Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions

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.1 The debate between these two positions has invoked many different resources, including quantum mechanics, social psychology, and basic metaphysics. 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 (e.g., Kane 1999, 218; Strawson 1986, 30; Vargas 2006); others have challenged this claim and suggested that people's intuitions actually fit with compatibilism (Nahmias et al. 2005). 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. 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. Our aim here is to present and defend a hypothesis about the processes that generate people's intuitions concerning moral responsibility. Our hypothesis is that people have an incompatibilist theory of moral responsibility that is elicited in some contexts but that they also have psychological mechanisms that can lead them to arrive at compatibilist judgments in other contexts.2 To support this hypothesis, we report new experimental data. These data show that people's responses to questions about moral responsibility can vary dramatically depending on the way in which the question is formulated. When asked questions that call for a more abstract, theoretical sort of cognition, people give overwhelmingly incompatibilist answers. But when asked questions that trigger emotions, their answers become far more compatibilist. In their attempts to get a handle on folk concepts and folk theories, naturalistic philosophers have proceeded by looking at people's intuitions about particular cases (e.g., Knobe 2003a, 2003b; Nahmias et al. 2005; Nichols 2004a; Weinberg et al. 2001; Woolfolk et al. 2006). The basic technique is simple. The philosopher constructs a hypothetical scenario and then asks people whether, for instance, the agent in the scenario is morally responsible. By varying the details of the case and checking to see how people's intuitions are affected, one can gradually get a sense for the contours of the folk theory. This method is a good one, but it must be practiced with care. One cannot simply assume that all of the relevant intuitions are generated by the same underlying folk theory. It is always possible that different intuitions will turn out to have been generated by different psychological processes. Here we will focus especially on the role of affect in generating intuitions about moral responsibility. Our hypothesis is that, when people are confronted with a story about an agent who performs a morally bad behavior, this can trigger an immediate emotional response, and this emotional response can play a crucial role in their intuitions about whether the agent was morally responsible. In fact, people may sometimes declare such an agent to be morally responsible despite the fact that they embrace a theory of responsibility on which the agent is not responsible. Consider, for example, Watson's (1987) interesting discussion of the crimes of Robert Harris. Watson provides long quotations from a newspaper article about how Harris savagely murdered innocent people, showing no remorse for what he had done. Then he describes, in equally chilling detail, the horrible abuse Harris had to endure as he was growing up. After reading all of these vivid details, it would be almost impossible for a reader to respond by calmly out the implications of or theory of moral responsibility. reader will have a of including not but also of and intuitions about such a case be by emotions, with a that more abstract, theoretical about the of moral responsibility. it be that this sort of would be to people's to are hypothetical and a in To a at it that emotional are to have impact on people's intuitions about But a growing of experimental that this is This that affect an important role even in people's intuitions about hypothetical cases et al. 2001; Nichols et al. 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