[forthcoming in Review of Philosophy and Psychology]

The idea that incompatibilism is intuitive is one of the key motivations for incompatibilism. Not surprisingly, then, philosophers who defend incompatibilism often claim that incompatibilism is the natural, commonsense view about free will and moral responsibility (e.g., Pereboom 2001, Kane 1999, Strawson 1986). This claim has received some support from empirical studies that indicate that when given a description of a determinist universe, participants tend to say that a person in that universe could not be morally responsible for his actions (Nichols & Knobe 2007; Roskies & Nichols 2008; Sarkissian et al. 2010). There are, of course, sophisticated arguments for incompatibilism (e.g. Pereboom 2001; van Inwagen 1983), but the claim that incompatibilism resonates with commonsense is an important consideration in its favor.