Recent Work on Agency and Responsibility

I just noticed a couple of recent papers on free will that caught my eye.  So, I thought I would share them and ask the hive-mind here at Flickers to post additional recently published work in the discussion thread.  It would be nice to see what everyone is working on.  That said, here are three on my reading list:

Kristen Mickelson, "The Zygote Argument is Invalid: Now What?" Philosophical Studies (forthcoming).

Abstract:

Alfred Mele’s original Zygote Argument is invalid. At most, its premises entail the negative thesis that free action is incompossible with deterministic laws, but its conclusion asserts the positive thesis that deterministic laws preclude free action. The original, explanatory conclusion of the Zygote Argument can be defended only by supplementing it with a best-explanation argument that identifies deterministic laws as menacing. Arguably, though, the best explanation for the manipulation victim’s lack of freedom and responsibility is constitutive luck, which is a problem irrespective of the natural laws that obtain. This proposed explanation leads to a new “diagnostic” version of the Zygote Argument which concludes that free action is impossible even though deterministic laws pose no threat whatsoever to free will.

Kristen Mickelson, "A Critique of Vihvelin's Three-Fold Classification." Canadian Journal of Philosophy (2015).

Abstract:

In this essay, I argue for the rejection of Vihvelin's ‘Three-fold Classification’ , a nonstandard taxonomy of free-will compatibilism, incompatibilism, and impossibilism. Vihvelin is right that the standard taxonomy of these views is inadequate, and that a new taxonomy is needed to clarify the free-will debate. Significantly, Vihvelin notes that the standard formal definition of ‘incompatibilism’ does not capture the historically popular view that deterministic laws pose a threat to free will. Vihvelin's proposed solution is to redefine ‘incompatibilism.’ However, Vihvelin's formal definition of ‘incompatibilism’ is flawed according to her own arguments. In addition, Vihvelin's characterization of ‘compatibilism’ is incomplete, and at least two important free-will views are missing from her proposed taxonomy. Given the problems with Vihvelin's arguments for 3-FC, her novel view of the dialectic between the major free-will views lacks support.

Adam Feltz, "Experimental Philosophy of Actual and Counterfactual Free Will Intuitions." Consciousness and Cognition (2015).

Abstract:

Five experiments suggested that everyday free will and moral responsibility judgments about some hypothetical thought examples differed from free will and moral responsibility judgments about the actual world. Experiment 1 (N = 106) showed that free will intuitions about the actual world measured by the FAD-Plus poorly predicted free will intuitions about a hypothetical person performing a determined action (r = .13). Experiments 2–5 replicated this result and found the relations between actual free will judgments and free will judgments about hypothetical determined or fated actions (rs = .22–.35) were much smaller than the differences between them (η_p² = .2–.55). These results put some pressure on theoretical accounts of everyday intuitions about freedom and moral responsibility.

So, what else have you been reading, working on, or planning to read?

Comments

[Oisin Deery]

On the assumption that plugging one's own work is (at least sort of) okay, I've got four papers hot off the press this summer:

Oisín Deery. (2015) “The Fall from Eden: Why Libertarianism Isn’t Justified by Experience,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 93(2): 319-34.

Libertarians claim that our experience of free choice is indeterministic. They think that when we choose, our choice feels open in a way that would require indeterminism for the experience to be accurate. This claim then functions as a step in an argument in favour of libertarianism, the view that freedom requires indeterminism and we are free. Since, all else being equal, we should take experience at face value, libertarians argue, we should endorse libertarianism. Compatibilists, who think that freedom is consistent with determinism, respond to this argument in a number of ways, none of which is adequate. This paper defends a stronger compatibilist response. Compatibilists should concede, at least for argument’s sake, that our experience of freedom is in a sense libertarian. Yet they should also insist that our experience is in another sense compatibilist. Thus, even if libertarian descriptions of experience are phenomenologically apt, there is still a sense in which the experience might be veridical, assuming determinism. This response undermines a central motivation for libertarianism, since it removes any presumption in favour of libertarianism based on experience.

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Oisín Deery. (2015) “Why People Believe in Indeterminist Free Will,” Philosophical Studies, 172(8): 2033-54.

Recent empirical evidence indicates that (1) people tend to believe that they possess indeterminist free will, and (2) people’s experience of choosing and deciding is that they possess such freedom. Some also maintain that (3) people’s belief in indeterminist free will has its source in their experience of choosing and deciding. Yet there seem to be good reasons to resist endorsing (3). Despite this, I maintain that belief in indeterminist free will really does have its source in experience. I explain how this is so by appeal to the phenomenon of prospection, which is the mental simulation of future possibilities for the purpose of guiding action. Crucially, prospection can be experienced. And because of the way in which prospection models choice, it is easy for agents to experience and to believe that their choice is indeterministic. Yet this belief is not justified; the experience of prospection, and hence of free will as being indeterminist, is actually consistent with determinism.

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Oisín Deery, Taylor Davis and Jasmine Carey. (2015) “The Free-Will Intuitions Scale and the Question of Natural Compatibilism,” Philosophical Psychology, 28(6): 776-801.

Standard methods in experimental philosophy have sought to measure folk intuitions using experiments, but certain limitations are inherent in experimental methods. Accordingly, we have designed the Free-Will Intuitions Scale to empirically measure folk intuitions relevant to free-will debates using a different method. This method reveals what folk intuitions are like prior to participants’ being put in forced-choice experiments. Our results suggest that a central debate in the experimental philosophy of free will—the ‘natural’ compatibilism debate—is mistaken in assuming that folk intuitions are exclusively either compatibilist or incompatibilist. They also identify a number of important new issues in the empirical study of free-will intuitions.

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Oisín Deery, Taylor Davis and Jasmine Carey. (2015). “Defending the Free-Will Intuitions Scale: Reply to Stephen Morris,” Philosophical Psychology, 28(6): 808-14.

In our paper, “The Free-Will Intuitions Scale and the Question of Natural Compatibilism” (this issue), we seek to advance empirical debates about free will by measuring the relevant folk intuitions using the scale methodology of psychology, as a supplement to standard experimental methods. Stephen Morris (this issue) raises a number of concerns about our paper. Here, we respond to Morris’s concerns.

[Matt King]

I haven't had much time lately for reading, but I will plug my colleague Josh May's recent paper

"On the very concept of free will"

Synthese 191 (12):2849-2866 (2014)

Abstract
Determinism seems to rule out a robust sense of options but also prevent our choices from being a matter of luck. In this way, free will seems to require both the truth and falsity of determinism. If the concept of free will is coherent, something must have gone wrong. I offer a diagnosis on which this puzzle is due at least in part to a tension already present in the very idea of free will. I provide various lines of support for this hypothesis, including some experimental data gathered by probing the judgments of non-specialists

With that selflessness out of the way, I can plug my own recent paper on manipulation arguments and the standing to blame in JESP, which also criticizes Patrick Todd's recent paper on the subject.

My paper is here: http://www.jesp.org/articles/view.php?id=88
Patrick's paper is here: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/phimp/3521354.0012.007/1

Readers may be interested to know that PEA Soup will be doing a discussion of the paper, with initial commentary from Patrick, in late August (http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2015/07/journal-of-ethics-social-philosophy-discussion-24-august.html).