Further Thoughts on Counterfactuals, Compatibilism, Conceptual Mismatches, and Choices: Response to Commentaries

One key point that came up in all the commentaries was that there is a mismatch between what skeptical scientists mean by free will and what the general public understands. Nahmias articulated this most forcefully. Scientists may say that free will is an illusion, and by that they mean that science has no place for supernatural entities that mysteriously intervene in the flow of events to override physical causality and natural law. But when many laypersons hear that scientists deem free will an illusion, they think that their powers of rational choice and self-control have been discredited. Laypersons in our experiments respond to critiques of free will by cheating, stealing, aggressing, and doing other undesirable things. Surely the scientists and philosophers who express skepticism about free will are not intending to promote such behaviors. They do not even mean that “you do not have free will, so you might as well steal money and hurt people, and if you do those things you couldn’t really help it anyhow.” Possibly one interesting direction for future research would be to refine the laboratory manipulations to make explicit the distinctions that Mele and Nahmias have emphasized. One group might hear skepticism about having libertarian powers and supernatural agency. That is, they might be told it is false to think that two different outcomes could ensue from exactly the same person with the same thoughts and feelings in the same circumstances. Or they might be told that they do not have anything like an immaterial soul or other faculty that intervenes in their brains to alter behavior. In contrast, a second group might hear skepticism of their compatibilist powers: that rationality and self-control are largely illusory. The latter message might have a bigger impact on antisocial behavior than the former. Neuroethics (2011) 4:31–34 DOI 10.1007/s12152-010-9067-3