Moral psychology, empirical work in

1. Moral responsibility and free will

A famous challenge to our having free will and being morally responsible for what we do is (causal) determinism. If determinism is true, then the current state of the universe and the past together causally necessitate a unique future state. While compatibilists maintain that the truth of determinism does not preclude moral responsibility, incompatibilists insist that it does (see Determinism and indeterminism; Free will; Responsibility). One popular strategy among incompatibilists is to claim they have the intuitive, common sense or default position (e.g. Kane 1999). This can then motivate incompatibilism, shift the burden of proof onto compatibilists, and so on.

The claim that one theory is a piece of common sense is subject to empirical investigation (see Experimental philosophy). As such, some philosophers have presented nonphilosophers with hypothetical cases in order to see whether their natural inclination is toward incompatibilism. Some early studies, done primarily with undergraduate students in the US, have indicated that incompatibilism isn’t more intuitive, since most participants count someone as morally responsible for a wrongdoing, such as stealing, in a deterministic universe (e.g. Nahmias et al. 2006). However, subsequent studies suggest a more complicated picture. When presented with the abstract question of whether someone can be responsible in a world that operates as determinists maintain, the vast majority of people think not (about 86 per cent). Yet, in line with previous results, most people will say the protagonist is morally responsible in a hypothetical case (about 72 per cent), provided it is described in a concrete way that elicits emotional responses (Nichols and Knobe 2007). (For further discussion of variation among intuitions about moral responsibility, see Knobe and Doris 2010.)

Whether the incompatibilist intuitions are more reflective of ordinary thinking after all depends on whether we should take the affect associated with compatibilist intuitions as rendering them faulty in some way. If, for example, we assume emotion always distorts judgment, then the compatibilist intuitions might be construed as a ‘performance error’. In which case, reporting such intuitions would be akin to answering ‘Moses took two each’ in response to the misleading question ‘How many of each animal did Moses take on the ark?’

While determinism poses a classical threat to free will and moral responsibility, some have argued that empirical research itself is likewise threatening. Social psychologists, for example, have long demonstrated that arbitrary situational factors can affect what we do. In particular, helping behaviour can change dramatically by slightly altering environmental factors, such as ambient fragrance, temperature, weather, noise levels and lighting quality (see Miller 2009: §2). Presumably the phenomenon here is the familiar one of being less willing to help when in a bad mood. Still, the differences these factors can make are disconcerting. For example, in one provocative study, people in an area of a mall with pleasant smells, such as fresh baked cookies, helped more than twice as often as those near more neutral fragrances (Baron 1997). Presumably, most of us would not endorse such reasons for helping or not. One might worry that this undermines free will or moral responsibility, assuming they require something like the capacity to act only on reasons one would endorse upon reflection (Nahmias 2007; Doris 2009). (Similar results have led some to scepticism about stable character traits, and thus to criticize virtue ethics insofar as it relies on them – see Ethics and psychology §2.)