Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions
Shaun Nichols,Joshua Knobe
The dispute between compatibilists and incompatibilists must be one of the most persistent and heated deadlocks in Western philosophy. Incompatibilists maintain that people are not fully morally responsible if determinism is true, i.e., if every event is an inevitable consequence of the prior conditions and the natural laws. By contrast, compatibilists maintain that even if determinism is true our moral responsibility is not undermined in the slightest, for determinism and moral responsibility are perfectly consistent.
Fully responsible? How can they be responsible to any degree at all "if every event is an inevitable consequence of the prior conditions and the natural laws"?
That's the part I can't come to grips with from the compatibilists...
"Mary, my brain, wholly in sync with the laws of matter, compels me to tell you that you were never able to freely opt not to abort Jane. But my brain also compels me to tell you that you are morally responsible for having done so."
In other words, whatever "for all practical purposes" that means.
The debate between these two positions has invoked many different resources, including quantum mechanics, social psychology, and basic metaphysics.
And whatever the hell we do here.
But recent discussions have relied heavily on arguments that draw on people's intuitions about particular cases. Some philosophers have claimed that people have incompatibilist intuitions others have challenged this claim and suggested that people's intuitions actually fit with compatibilism.
Either way, our intuitive, visceral, "gut feelings" are among the most mysterious reactions we have. Neither wholly rational nor wholly emotional nor even wholly conscious, it just seems to bubble up from "somewhere" inside us.
Thus...
But although philosophers have constructed increasingly sophisticated arguments about the implications of people's intuitions, there has been remarkably little discussion about why people have the intuitions they do. That is to say, relatively little has been said about the specific psychological processes that generate or sustain people's intuitions.
Which takes us to the part where the sheer complexities of human psychology itself -- partly ego, partly superego, partly id/ partly conscious, partly subconscious, partly unconscious/partly genes, partly memes -- may be the place to go in figuring out exactly what that "somehow" is in explaining human autonomy.
Also, the mind-boggling mystery of human dreams. The part that seems perplexing [to me] beyond ever grasping.
Thus...
And yet, it seems clear that questions about the sources of people's intuitions could have a major impact on debates about the compatibility of responsibility and determinism. There is an obvious sense in which it is important to figure out whether people's intuitions are being produced by a process that is generally reliable or whether they are being distorted by a process that generally leads people astray.
Then this part:
1] it hasn't been pinned down yet
2] it's not likely to be pinned before any of us here shuffle off our mortal coils