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Moral Responsibility and Determinism:
The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions
Shaun Nichols
Department of Philosophy, University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721
snichols@email.arizona.edu
Joshua Knobe
Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599
knobe@email.unc.edu
1. INTRODUCTION
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
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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 forthcoming); others have challenged this claim and suggested that
people’s intuitions actually fit with compatibilism (Nahmias et al. forthcoming). 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.
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2. AFFECT, BLAME, AND THE ATTRIBUTION OF RESPONSIBILITY
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 forthcoming; Nichols 2004a; Weinberg et al. 2001; Woolfolk et al.
forthcoming). 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
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reading all of these vivid details, it would be almost impossible for a reader to respond by calmly
working out the implications of his or her theory of moral responsibility. Any normal reader will
have a rich array of reactions, including not only abstract philosophical theorizing but also
feelings of horror and disgust. A reader’s intuitions about such a case might be swayed by her
emotions, leaving her with a conclusion that contravened her more abstract, theoretical beliefs
about the nature of moral responsibility.
Still, it might be thought that this sort of effect would be unlikely to influence people’s
reactions to ordinary philosophical examples. Most philosophical examples are purely
hypothetical and thinly described (often only a few sentences in length). To a first glance at least,
it might seem that emotional reactions are unlikely to have any impact on people’s intuitions
about examples like these. But a growing body of experimental evidence indicates that this
commonsense view is mistaken. This evidence suggests that affect plays an important role even
in people’s intuitions about thinly described, purely hypothetical cases (Blair 1995; Greene et al.
2001; Nichols 2002; Haidt et al. 1993).
It may seem puzzling that affect should play such a powerful role, and a number of
different models of the role of emotion in evaluative thought have been proposed. We will
discuss some of these models in further detail in sections 5, 6, and 7. In the meantime, we want
to point to one factor that appears to influence people’s affective reactions. A recent study by
Smart and Loewenstein (forthcoming) shows that when a transgressor is made more
‘determinate’ for subjects, subjects experience greater negative affect and are more punitive
towards that agent as a result. In the study, subjects play a game in which they can privately
cooperate or defect. Each subject is assigned an identifying number, but none of the subjects
knows anyone else’s number. The experimenter puts the numbers of the defectors into an
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envelope. The cooperators are subsequently allowed to decide whether to penalize a defector.
The cooperator is informed that he will pick a number out of the envelope to determine which
defector will be penalized (or not). The manipulation was unbelievably subtle. In the
indeterminate condition, subjects decide how much to penalize before they draw the number; in
the determinate condition, subjects decide how much to penalize after they draw the number.
Despite this tiny difference, Smart and Loewenstein found a significant effect – subjects in the
determinate condition gave worse penalties than subjects in the indeterminate condition.
Furthermore, subjects filled out a self-report questionnaire on how much anger, blame, and
sympathy they felt, and subjects in the determinate condition felt more anger and blame than
subjects in the indeterminate condition. Finally, using mediational statistical analysis, Smart and
Loewenstein found that determinateness impacts punitiveness by virtue of provoking stronger
emotions.
As we shall see, previous studies of people’s moral responsibility intuitions all featured
determinate agents and therefore were designed in a way that would tend to trigger affective
reactions. Our own study provides an opportunity to see how people’s intuitions are altered when
the stimuli are designed in a way that keeps affective reactions to a minimum.
3. INTUITIONS ABOUT FREE WILL AND RESPONSIBILITY
Incompatibilist philosophers have traditionally claimed both that ordinary people believe
that human decisions are not governed by deterministic laws and that ordinary people believe
that determinism is incompatible with moral responsibility (e.g., Kane 1999; Strawson 1986).
These claims have been based, not on systematic empirical research, but rather on anecdote and
informal observation. For example, Kane writes, “In my experience, most ordinary persons start
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out as natural incompatibilists” (1999, 217). (As will be clear below, we think Kane is actually
getting at something deep about our intuitions here.) In recent years, philosophers have sought
to put claims like this one to the test using experimental methods. The results have sometimes
been surprising.
First, consider the claim that ordinary people believe that human decisions are not
governed by deterministic laws. In a set of experiments exploring the lay understanding of
choice, both children and adults tended to treat moral choices as indeterminist (Nichols 2004a).
Participants were presented with cases of moral choice events (e.g., a girl steals a candy bar) and
physical events (e.g., a pot of water comes to a boil), and they were asked whether, if everything
in the world was the same right up until the event occurred, the event had to occur. Both
children and adults were more likely to say that the physical event had to occur than that the
moral choice event had to occur. This result seems to vindicate the traditional claim that ordinary
people in our culture believe that at least some human decisions are not determined.
Experimental study has not been so kind to the traditional claim that ordinary people are
incompatibilists about responsibility. Woolfolk, Doris and Darley (forthcoming) gave
participants a story about an agent who is captured by kidnappers and given a powerful
‘compliance drug.’ The drug makes it impossible for him to disobey orders. The kidnappers
order him to perform an immoral action, and he cannot help but obey. Subjects in the ‘low
identification condition’ were told that the agent did not want to perform the immoral action and
was only performing it because he had been given the compliance drug. Subjects in the ‘high
identification condition’ were told that the agent wanted to perform the immoral action all along
and felt no reluctance about performing it. The results showed a clear effect of identification:
subjects in the high identification condition gave higher ratings of responsibility for the agent
6
than subjects in the low identification condition. This result fits beautifully with the compatibilist
view that responsibility depends on identification (e.g. Frankfurt 1988). However, subjects in
both conditions showed an overall tendency to give low ratings of responsibility for the agent. So
these results don’t pose a direct threat to the view that people are incompatibilists about
responsibility.
The final set of studies we’ll review poses a greater problem for the view that people are
intuitive incompatibilists. Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer and Turner (forthcoming) find that
participants will hold an agent morally responsible even when they are told to assume that the
agent is in a deterministic universe. For instance, they presented participants with the following
scenario:
Imagine that in the next century we discover all the laws of nature, and we build a
supercomputer which can deduce from these laws of nature and from the current state of
everything in the world exactly what will be happening in the world at any future time. It
can look at everything about the way the world is and predict everything about how it
will be with 100% accuracy. Suppose that such a supercomputer existed, and it looks at
the state of the universe at a certain time on March 25th, 2150 A.D., twenty years before
Jeremy Hall is born. The computer then deduces from this information and the laws of
nature that Jeremy will definitely rob Fidelity Bank at 6:00 PM on January 26th, 2195. As
always, the supercomputer’s prediction is correct; Jeremy robs Fidelity Bank at 6:00 PM
on January 26th, 2195.
Participants were subsequently asked whether Jeremy is morally blameworthy for robbing the
bank. The results were striking: 83% of subjects said that Jeremy was morally blameworthy for
robbing the bank. In two additional experiments with different scenarios, similar effects
7
emerged, suggesting that lay people regard moral responsibility as compatible with determinism.
These findings are fascinating, and we will try to build on them in our own experiments.
Of course, it is possible to challenge the experiments on methodological grounds. For
instance, the scenarios use technical vocabulary (e.g., “laws of nature”, “current state”), and one
might wonder whether the subjects really understood the scenarios. Further, one might complain
that determinism is not made sufficiently salient in the scenarios. The story of the supercomputer
focuses on the predictability of events in the universe, and many philosophers have taken the
predictability of the universe to be less threatening to free will than causal inevitability.
Although one might use these methodological worries to dismiss the results, we are not inclined
to do so. For we think that Nahmias and colleagues have tapped into something of genuine
interest.3 They report three quite different scenarios that produce much the same effect. In each
of their experiments, most people (60-85%) say that the agent is morally responsible even under
the assumption that determinism is true. Moreover, the results coincide with independent
psychological work on the assignment of punishment. Viney and colleagues found that college
students who were identified as determinists were no less punitive than indeterminists (Viney et
al. 1982) and no less likely to offer retributivist justifications for punishments (Viney et al.
1988).4 So, we will assume that Nahmias et al. are right that when faced with an agent
intentionally doing a bad action in a deterministic setting, people tend to hold the agent morally
responsible.
But if people so consistently give compatibilist responses on experimental questionnaires,
why have some philosophers concluded that ordinary people are incompatibilists?5 Have these
philosophers simply been failing to listen to their own undergraduate students? We suspect that
something more complex is going on. On our view, most people (at least in our culture) really do
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hold incompatibilist theories of moral responsibility, and these theories can easily be brought out
in the kinds of philosophical discussions that arise, e.g., in university seminars. It’s just that, in
addition to these theories of moral responsibility, people also have immediate affective reactions
to stories about immoral behaviors. What we see in the results of the experiments by Nahmias
and colleagues is, in part, the effect of these affective reactions. To uncover people’s underlying
theories, we need to offer them questions that call for more abstract, theoretical cognition.
4. EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE: FIRST PHASE
We conducted a series of experiments to explore whether participants will be more likely to
report incompatibilist intuitions if the emotional and motivational factors are minimized. In each
experiment, one condition, the concrete condition, was designed to elicit greater affective
response; the other condition, the abstract condition, was designed to trigger abstract, theoretical
cognition. We predicted that people would be more likely to respond as compatibilists in the
concrete condition.
Before we present the details of the experiments, we should note that there are many
ways to characterize determinism. The most precise characterizations involve technical language
about, for example, the laws of nature. However, we think it’s a mistake to use technical
terminology for these sorts of experiments, and we therefore tried to present the issue in more
accessible language.6 Of course, any attempt to translate complex philosophical issues into
simpler terms will raise difficult questions. It is certainly possible that the specific description of
determinism used in our study biased people’s intuitions in one direction or another. Perhaps the
overall rate of incompatibilist responses would have been somewhat higher or lower if we had
used a subtly different formulation.
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One should keep in mind, however, that our main focus here is on the difference between
people’s responses in the concrete condition and their responses in the abstract condition. Even
though we use exactly the same description of determinism in these two conditions, we predict
that people will give compatibilist responses in the concrete condition and incompatibilist
responses in the abstract condition. Such an effect could not be dismissed as an artifact of our
description of determinism. If a difference actually does emerge, we will therefore have good
evidence for the view that affect is playing some role in people’s compatibilist intuitions.
All of our studies were conducted on undergraduates at the University of Utah,7 and all
of the studies began with the same setup. Participants were given the following description of a
determinist universe and an indeterminist universe:
Imagine a universe (Universe A) in which everything that happens is completely caused
by whatever happened before it. This is true from the very beginning of the universe, so
what happened in the beginning of the universe caused what happened next, and so on
right up until the present. For example one day John decided to have French Fries at
lunch. Like everything else, this decision was completely caused by what happened
before it. So, if everything in this universe was exactly the same up until John made his
decision, then it had to happen that John would decide to have French Fries.
Now imagine a universe (Universe B) in which almost everything that happens is
completely caused by whatever happened before it. The one exception is human decision
making. For example, one day Mary decided to have French Fries at lunch. Since a
person’s decision in this universe is not completely caused by what happened before it,
even if everything in the universe was exactly the same up until Mary made her decision,
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it did not have to happen that Mary would decide to have French Fries. She could have
decided to have something different.
The key difference, then, is that in Universe A every decision is completely caused by
what happened before the decision – given the past, each decision has to happen the way
that it does. By contrast, in Universe B, decisions are not completely caused by the past,
and each human decision does not have to happen the way that it does.
1. Which of these universes do you think is most like ours? (circle one)
Universe A Universe B
Please briefly explain your answer:
The purpose of this initial question was simply to see whether subjects believe that our
own universe is deterministic or indeterministic. Across conditions, nearly all participants (over
90%) judged that the indeterministic universe is more similar to our own.
After answering the initial question, subjects received a question designed to test
intuitions about compatibilism and incompatibilism. Subjects were randomly assigned either to
the concrete condition or to the abstract condition. We ran several different versions, but we
will focus on the most important ones. In one of our concrete conditions, subjects were given the
following question:
In Universe A, a man named Bill has become attracted to his secretary, and he decides
that the only way to be with her is to kill his wife and 3 children. He knows that it is
impossible to escape from his house in the event of a fire. Before he leaves on a business
trip, he sets up a device in his basement that burns down the house and kills his family.
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Is Bill fully morally responsible for killing his wife and children?
YES NO
In this condition, most subjects (72%) gave the compatibilist response that the agent was fully
morally responsible. This is comparable to results obtained in experiments by Nahmias and
colleagues. But now consider one of our abstract conditions:
In Universe A, is it possible for a person to be fully morally responsible for their actions?
YES NO
In this condition, most subjects (86%) gave the incompatibilist response!
In short, most people give the compatibilist response to the concrete case, but the vast
majority give the incompatibilist response to the abstract case. What on earth could explain this
dramatic difference? Let’s first consider a deflationary possibility. Perhaps the concrete
condition is so long and complex that subjects lose track of the fact that the agent is in a
determinist universe. This is a perfectly sensible explanation. To see whether this accounts for
the difference, we ran another concrete condition in which the scenario was short and simple.
Subjects were given all the same initial descriptions and then given the following question:
In Universe A, Bill stabs his wife and children to death so that he can be with his
secretary. Is it possible that Bill is fully morally responsible for killing his family?
YES NO
Even in this simple scenario, 50% of subjects gave the compatibilist response, which is still
significantly different from the very low number of compatibilist responses in the abstract
condition.8
As we noted above, there are many ways of describing determinism, and the overall rate
of incompatibilist responses might have been higher or lower if we had used a somewhat
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different description. Still, one cannot plausibly dismiss the high rate of incompatibilist
responses in the abstract condition as a product of some subtle bias in our description of
determinism. After all, the concrete condition used precisely the same description, and yet
subjects in that condition were significantly more likely to give compatibilist responses.9
These initial experiments replicated the finding (originally due to Nahmias et al.) that
people have compatibilist intuitions when presented with vignettes that trigger affective
responses. But they also yielded a new and surprising result. When subjects were presented with
an abstract vignette, they had predominantly incompatibilist intuitions. This pattern of results
suggests that affect is playing a key role in generating people’s compatibilist intuitions.
5. PSYCHOLOGICAL MODELS
Thus far, we have been providing evidence for the claim that different folk intuitions about
responsibility are produced by different kinds of psychological processes. But if it is indeed the
case that one sort of process leads to compatibilist intuitions and another leads to incompatibilist
intuitions, which sort of process should we regard as the best guide to the true relationship
between moral responsibility and determinism?
Before we can address this question, we need to know a little bit more about the specific
psychological processes that might underlie different types of folk intuitions. We therefore
consider a series of possible models. We begin by looking at three extremely simple models and
then go on to consider ways that elements of these simple models might be joined together to
form more complex models.
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The performance error model
Perhaps the most obvious way of explaining the data reported here would be to suggest
that strong affective reactions can bias and distort people’s judgments. On this view, people
ordinarily make responsibility judgments by relying on a tacit theory, but when they are faced
with a truly egregious violation of moral norms (as in our concrete cases), they experience a
strong affective reaction which makes them unable to apply the theory correctly. In short, this
hypothesis posits an affective performance error. That is, it draws a distinction between people’s
underlying representations of the criteria for moral responsibility and the performance systems
that enable them to apply those criteria to particular cases. It then suggests that people’s
affective reactions are interfering with the normal operation of the performance systems.
The performance error model draws support from the vast literature in social psychology
on the interaction between affect and theoretical cognition. This literature has unearthed
numerous ways in which people’s affective reactions can interfere with their ability to reason
correctly. Under the influence of affective or motivational biases, people are less likely to recall
certain kinds of relevant information, less likely to believe unwanted evidence, and less likely to
use critical resources to attack conclusions that are motivationally neutral (see Kunda 1990 for a
review). Given that we find these biases in so many other aspects of cognition, it is only natural
to conclude that they can be found in moral responsibility judgments as well.
More pointedly, there is evidence that affect sometimes biases attributions of
responsibility. Lerner and colleagues found that when subjects’ negative emotions are aroused,
they hold agents more responsible and more deserving of punishment, even when the negative
emotions are aroused by an unrelated event (Lerner et al. 1998). In their study, subjects in the
anger condition watched a video clip of a bully beating up a teenager; while subjects in the
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emotion-neutral condition watched a video clip of abstract figures (Lerner et al. 1998, 566). All
subjects were then presented with what they were told was a different experiment designed to
examine how people assess responsibility for negligent behaviors. Subjects in the anger
condition (i.e., those who had been seen the bully video) gave higher responsibility ratings than
subjects in the emotion-neutral condition. So, although the subjects’ emotions were induced by
the film, these emotions impacted their responsibility judgments in unrelated scenarios. The
most natural way to interpret this result is that the emotion served to bias the reasoning people
used in making their assessments of responsibility.
Proponents of the performance error model might suggest that a similar phenomenon is at
work in the experiments we have reported here. They would concede that people give
compatibilist responses under certain circumstances, but they would deny that there is any real
sense in which people can be said to hold a compatibilist view of moral responsibility. Instead,
they would claim that the compatibilist responses we find in our concrete conditions are to be
understood in terms of performance errors brought about by affective reactions. In the abstract
condition, people’s underlying theory is revealed for what it is ─ incompatibilist.
Affective competence model
There is, however, another possible way of understanding the role of affect in the
assessment of moral responsibility. Instead of supposing that affect serves only to bias or distort
our theoretical judgments, one might suggest that people’s affective reactions actually lie at the
core of the process by which they ordinarily assign responsibility. Perhaps people normally
make responsibility judgments by experiencing an affective reaction which, in combination with
certain other processes, enables an assessment of moral responsibility. Of course, it can hardly
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be denied that some people also have elaborate theories of moral responsibility and that they use
these theories in certain activities (e.g., in writing philosophy papers), but the proponents of this
second view would deny that people’s cold cognitive theories of responsibility play any real role
in the process by means of which they normally make responsibility judgments. This process,
they would claim, is governed primarily by affect.
This ‘affective competence’ view gains some support from recent studies of people with
deficits in emotional processing due to psychological illnesses. When these people are given
questions that require moral judgments, they sometimes offer bizarre patterns of responses (Blair
1995; Blair et al. 1997; Hauser et al forthcoming). In other words, when we strip away the
capacity for affective reactions, it seems that we are not left with a person who can apply the
fundamental criteria of morality in an especially impartial or unbiased fashion. Instead, we seem
to be left with someone who has trouble understanding what morality is all about. Results from
studies like these have led some researchers to conclude that affect must be playing an important
role in the fundamental competence underlying people’s moral judgments (Blair 1995; Haidt
2001; Nichols 2004b; Prinz forthcoming).
Proponents of this view might suggest that the only way to really get a handle on people’s
capacity for moral judgment is to look at their responses in cases that provoke affective
reactions. When we examine these cases, people seem to show a marked tendency to offer
compatibilist responses, and it might therefore be suggested that the subjects in our studies
should be regarded as compatibilists. Of course, we have also provided data indicating that these
subjects provide incompatibilist answers when given theoretical questions, but it might be felt
that studying people’s theoretical beliefs tells us little or nothing about how they really go about
making moral judgments. (Think of what would happen if we tried to study the human capacity
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for language by asking people theoretical questions about the principles of syntax!) Thus,
affective competency theorists might maintain that the best way to describe our findings would
be to say that people’s fundamental moral competence is a compatibilist one but that some
people happen to subscribe to a theory that contradicts this fundamental competence.
Concrete competence model
Finally, we need to consider the possibility that people’s responses are not being
influenced by affect in any way. Perhaps people’s responses in the concrete conditions are
actually generated by a purely cognitive process. Even if we assume that the process at work
here can only be applied to concrete cases, we should not necessarily conclude that it makes
essential use of affect. It might turn out that we have an entirely cognitive, affect-free process
that, for whatever reason, can be applied to concrete questions but not to abstract ones.
One particularly appealing version of this hypothesis would be that people’s intuitions in
the concrete conditions are generated by an innate ‘moral responsibility module.’10 This module
could take as input information about an agent and his or her behavior and then produce as
output an intuition as to whether or not that agent is morally responsible. Presumably, the
module would not use the same kinds of processes that are used in conscious reasoning. Instead,
it would use a process that is swift, automatic, and entirely unconscious.
Here, the key idea is that only limited communication is possible between the module and
the rest of the mind. The module takes as input certain very specific kinds of information about
the agent (the fact that the agent is a human being, the fact that he knows what he is doing, etc.),
but the vast majority of the person’s beliefs would be entirely inaccessible to processes taking
place inside of the module. Thus, the module would not be able to make use of the person’s
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theory about the relationship between determinism and moral responsibility. It might not even be
able to make use of the person’s belief that the agent is in a deterministic universe. Because these
beliefs would be inaccessible inside of the module, the conclusions of the module could differ
dramatically from the conclusions that the person would reach after a process of conscious
consideration.
Hybrid Models
Thus far, we have been considering three simple models of responsibility attribution. It
would be possible, however, to construct more complex models by joining together elements of
the three simple ones we have already presented. So, for example, it might turn out that moral
responsibility judgments are subserved by a module but that the workings of this module are
sometimes plagued with affective performance errors, or that the fundamental competence
underlying responsibility judgments makes essential use of affect but that this affect somehow
serves as input to a module, and many other possible hybrids might be suggested here.
Since we are unable to consider all of the possible hybrid models, we will focus on one
that we find especially plausible. On the hybrid model we will be discussing, affect plays two
distinct roles in the assignment of moral responsibility. Specifically, affect serves both as part of
the fundamental competence underlying responsibility judgments and as a factor that can
sometimes lead to performance errors. To get a sense for what we mean here, imagine that you
are trying to determine whether certain poems should be regarded as ‘moving,’ and now suppose
you discover that one of the poems was actually written by your best friend. Here, it seems that
the basic competence underlying your judgment would involve one sort of affect (your feelings
about the poems) but the performance systems enabling your judgment could be derailed by
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another sort of affect (your feelings about the friend). The hybrid model in question would
suggest that a similar sort of process takes place in judgments of moral responsibility. The
competence underlying these judgments does make use of affect, but affect can also be
implicated in processes that ultimately lead to performance errors.
Proponents of this model might suggest that affect does play an important role in the
competence underlying moral responsibility judgments but that the effect obtained in the
experiments reported here should still be treated as a performance error.11 In other words, even
if we suppose that affect has an important role to play in moral responsibility judgments, we can
still conclude that the basic competence underlying these judgments is an incompatibilist one and
that the responses we find in our concrete conditions are the result of a failure to apply that
competence correctly.
6. EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE: SECOND PHASE
Now that we have described some of the psychological models that might explain our
results, we can explore a bit more deeply whether experimental evidence counts against any of
the models. One key question is whether or not the compatibilist responses in our experiments
are really the product of affect. We compared concrete conditions with abstract conditions, and
we suggested that the concrete descriptions triggered greater affective response, which in turn
pushed subjects toward compatibilist responses. However, it’s possible that what really mattered
was concreteness itself, not any affect associated with concreteness. That is, it’s possible that the
compatibilist responses were not influenced by affect but were elicited simply because the
scenario involved a particular act by a particular individual. Indeed, this is exactly the sort of
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explanation one would expect from the responsibility module account. Fortunately, there is a
direct way to test this proposal.
To explore whether concreteness alone can explain the compatibilist responses, we ran
another experiment in which the affective salience varied across the two questions, but
concreteness was held constant. Again, all subjects were given the initial descriptions of the two
universes, A and B, and all subjects were asked which universe they thought was most similar to
ours. Subjects were randomly assigned either to the high affect or low affect condition. In the
high affect condition, subjects were asked the following:
As he has done many times in the past, Bill stalks and rapes a stranger. Is it possible that
Bill is fully morally responsible for raping the stranger?
In the low affect condition, subjects were asked:
As he has done many times in the past, Mark arranges to cheat on his taxes. Is it possible
that Mark is fully morally responsible for cheating on his taxes?
In addition, in each condition, for half of the subjects, the question stipulated that the agent was
in Universe A; for the other half the agent was in Universe B. Thus, each subject was randomly
assigned to one of the cells in Table 1.
Agent in
indeterminist
universe
Agent in
determinist
universe
High affect
case
Low affect
case
Table 1
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What did we find? Even when we used these exclusively concrete scenarios, there was a
clear difference between the high affect and low affect cases. Among subjects who were asked
about agents in a determinist universe, people were much more likely to give the incompatibilist
answer in the low affect case than in the high affect case. Indeed, most people said that it is not
possible that the tax cheat is fully morally responsible, and a clear majority said that it is possible
that the rapist is fully morally responsible. By contrast, for subjects who were asked about an
agent in an indeterminist universe, most people said that it is possible for the agent to be fully
morally responsible, regardless of whether he was a tax cheat or a rapist.12 See Table 2.
21
Agent in
indeterminist
universe
Agent in
determinist
universe
High affect
case
95% 64%
Low affect
case
89% 23%
Table 2
These results help to clarify the role that affect plays in people’s responsibility
attributions Even when we control for concreteness, we still find that affect impacts people’s
intuitions about responsibility under determinism. The overall pattern of results therefore
suggests that affect is playing an important role in the process that generates people’s
compatibilist intuitions.
We now have good evidence that affect plays a role in compatibilist judgments. But
there remains the difficult question of whether what we see in these responses is the result of an
affective competence or an affective performance error. Let’s consider whether one of these
models provides a better explanation of the experiment we just reported.
We think that the affective performance error model provides quite a plausible
explanation of our results. What we see in the tax cheat case is that, when affect is minimized,
people give dramatically different answers depending on whether the agent is in a determinist or
indeterminist universe. On the performance error hypothesis, these responses reveal the genuine
competence with responsibility attribution, for in the low affect cases, the affective bias is
minimized. When high affect is introduced, as in the serial rapist case, the normal competence
22
with responsibility attribution is skewed by the emotions; that explains why there is such a large
difference between the high and low affect cases in the determinist conditions.
Now let’s turn to the affective competence account. It’s much less clear that the affective
competence theorist has a good explanation of the results. In particular, it seems difficult to see
how the affective competence account can explain why responses to the low-affect case drop
precipitously in the determinist condition, since this doesn’t hold for the high affect case.
Perhaps the affective competence theorist could say that low affect cases like the tax cheat case
fail to trigger our competence with responsibility attribution, and so we should not treat those
responses as reflecting our normal competence. But obviously it would take significant work to
show that such everyday cases of apparent responsibility attribution don’t really count as cases in
which we exercise our competence at responsibility attribution. Thus, at first glance, the
performance error account provides a better explanation of these results than the affective
competence account.
Of course even if it is true that our results are best explained by the performance error
account, this doesn’t mean that affect is irrelevant to the normal competence. As noted in the
previous section, one option that strikes us as quite plausible is a hybrid account on which (i) our
normal competence with responsibility attribution does depend on affective systems, but (ii)
affect also generates a bias leading to compatibilist responses in our experiments.
Although our experiment provides some reason to favor the performance error account of
the compatibilist responses we found, it seems clear that deciding between the affective
performance error and the affective competence models of compatibilist responses is not the sort
of issue that will be resolved by a single crucial experiment. What we really need here is a
deeper understanding of the role that affect plays in moral cognition more generally.
23
(Presumably, if we had a deeper understanding of this more general issue, we would be able to
do a better job of figuring out how empirical studies could address the specific question about the
role of affect in judgments of moral responsibility.) But our inability to resolve all of the relevant
questions immediately is no cause for pessimism. On the contrary, we see every reason to be
optimistic about the prospects for research in this area. Recent years have seen a surge of interest
in the ways in which affect can influence moral cognition – with new empirical studies and
theoretical developments coming in all the time – and it seems likely that the next few years will
yield important new insights into the question at hand.
7. PHILOSOPHICAL IMPLICATIONS
Our findings help to explain why the debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists
is so stubbornly persistent. It seems that certain psychological processes tend to generate
compatibilist intuitions, while others tend to generate incompatibilist intuitions. Thus, each of the
two major views appeals to an element of our psychological makeup.
But the experimental results do not serve merely to give us insight into the causal origins
of certain philosophical positions; they also help us to evaluate some of the arguments that have
been put forward in support of those positions. After all, many of these arguments rely on
explicit appeals to intuition. If we find that different intuitions are produced by different
psychological mechanisms, we might conclude that some of these intuitions should be given
more weight than others. What we need to know now is which intuitions to take seriously and
which to dismiss as products of mechanisms that are only leading us astray.
Clearly, the answer will depend partly on which, if any, of the three models described
above turns out to be the right one, and since we don’t yet have the data we need to decide
24
between these competing models, we will not be able to offer a definite conclusion here. Our
approach will therefore be to consider each of the models in turn and ask what implications it
would have (if it turned out to be correct) for broader philosophical questions about the role of
intuitions in the debate over moral responsibility.
Performance error model
If compatibilist intuitions are explained by the performance error model, then we
shouldn’t assign much weight to these intuitions. For on that model, as we have described it,
compatibilist intuitions are a product of the distorting effects of emotion and motivation. If we
could eliminate the performance errors, the compatibilist intuitions should disappear.
Note that the performance error model does not claim that people’s compatibilist
intuitions are actually incorrect. What it says is simply that the process that generates these
intuitions involves a certain kind of error. It is certainly possible that, even though the process
involves this error, it ends up yielding a correct conclusion. Still, we feel that the performance
error model has important philosophical implications. At the very least, it suggests that the fact
that people sometimes have compatibilist intuitions does not itself give us reason to suppose that
compatibilism is correct.
The philosophical implications of the performance error model have a special
significance because the experimental evidence gathered thus far seems to suggest that the basic
idea behind this model is actually true. But the jury is still out. Further research might show that
one of the other models is in fact more accurate, and we therefore consider their philosophical
implications as well.
25
Affective competence model
On the affective competence model, people’s responses in the concrete conditions of our
original experiment are genuine expressions of their underlying competence. The suggestion is
that the compatibilist responses people give in these conditions are not clouded by any kind of
performance error. Rather, these responses reflect a successful implementation of the system we
normally use for making responsibility judgments, and that system should therefore be regarded
as a compatibilist one.
In many ways, this affective competence model is reminiscent of the view that P.F.
Strawson (1962) puts forward in his classic paper ‘Freedom and Resentment.’ On that view, it
would be a mistake to go about trying to understand the concept of moral responsibility by
seeking to associate it with some sort of metaphysical theory. Rather, the best place to start is
with an examination of the ‘reactive attitudes’ (blame, remorse, gratitude, etc.) and the role they
play in our ordinary practice of responsibility attribution.
Yet, despite the obvious affinities between the affective competence model and
Strawson’s theory, it is important to keep in mind certain respects in which the affective
competence model is making substantially weaker claims. Most importantly, the model isn’t
specifically claiming that people proceed correctly in the concrete conditions. All it says is that
people’s responses in these conditions reflect a successful implementation of their own
underlying system for making responsibility judgments. This claim then leaves it entirely open
whether the criteria used in that underlying system are themselves correct or incorrect.
For an analogous case, consider the ways in which people ordinarily make probability
judgments. It can be shown that people’s probability judgments often involve incorrect
inferences, and one might therefore be tempted to assume that people are not correctly applying
26
their own underlying criteria for probabilistic inference. But many psychologists reject this
view. They suggest that people actually are correctly applying their underlying criteria and that
the mistaken probabilistic inferences only arise because people’s underlying criteria are
themselves faulty (see, e.g., Tversky and Kahneman 1981; 1983).
Clearly, a similar approach could be applied in the case of responsibility judgments.
Even if people’s compatibilist intuitions reflect a successful implementation of their underlying
system for making responsibility judgments, one could still argue that this underlying system is
itself flawed. Hence, the affective competence model would vindicate the idea that people’s core
views about responsibility are compatibilist, but it would be a mistake to regard the model as an
outright vindication of those intuitions.
Concrete competence model
The implications of the concrete competence model depend in a crucial way on the
precise details of the competence involved. Since it is not possible to say anything very general
about all of the models in this basic category, we will focus specifically on the implications of
the claim that people’s responsibility attributions are subserved by an encapsulated module.
As a number of authors have noted, modularity involves a kind of trade-off. The key
advantages of modules are that they usually operate automatically, unconsciously, and extremely
quickly. But these advantages come at a price. The reason why modules are able to operate so
quickly is that they simply ignore certain sources of potentially relevant information. Even when
we know that the lines in the Müller-Lyer illusion are the same length, we still have the visual
illusion. Perhaps in the assignment of moral responsibility, we are dealing with a similar sort of
phenomenon — a ‘moral illusion.’ It might be that people have a complex and sophisticated
27
theory about the relationship between determinism and moral responsibility but that the relevant
module just isn’t able to access this theory. It continues to spit out judgments that the agent is
blameworthy even when these judgments go against a consciously held theory elsewhere in the
mind.
Of course, defenders of compatibilism might point out that this argument can also be
applied in the opposite direction. They might suggest that the module itself contains a complex
and sophisticated theory to which the rest of the mind has no access. The conclusion would be
that, unless we use the module to assess the relationship between determinism and moral
responsibility, we will arrive at an impoverished and inadequate understanding. This type of
argument definitely seems plausible in certain domains (e.g., in the domain of grammatical
theory). It is unclear at this point whether something analogous holds true for the domain of
responsibility attribution.13
Reflective equilibrium
Our concern in this section has been with philosophical questions about whether
knowledge of particular mental processes are likely to give us valuable insight into complex
moral issues. Clearly, these philosophical questions should be carefully distinguished from the
purely psychological question as to whether people think that particular mental processes give
them insight into these issues. Even if people think that a given process is affording them
valuable moral insight, it might turn out that this process is actually entirely unreliable and they
would be better off approaching these issues in a radically different way.
Still, we thought it would be interesting to know how people themselves resolve the
tension between their rival intuitions, and we therefore ran one final experiment. All subjects
28
were given a brief description of the results from our earlier studies and then asked to adjudicate
the conflict between the compatibilist and incompatibilist intuitions. Given that people’s
intuitions in the concrete conditions contradict their intuitions in the abstract conditions, would
they choose to hold on to the concrete judgment that Bill is morally responsible or the abstract
judgment that no one can be responsible in a deterministic universe?14 The results showed no
clear majority on either side. Approximately half of the subjects chose to hold onto the judgment
that the particular agent was morally responsible, while the other half chose to hold onto the
judgment that no one can be responsible in a deterministic universe.15 Apparently, there is no
more consensus about these issues among the folk than there is among philosophers.
9. CONCLUSION
As we noted at the outset, participants in the debate over moral responsibility have
appealed to an enormous variety of arguments. Theories from metaphysics, moral philosophy,
philosophy of mind and even quantum mechanics have all been shown to be relevant in one way
or another, and researchers are continually finding new ways in which seemingly unrelated
considerations can be brought to bear on the issue. The present paper has not been concerned
with the full scope of this debate. Instead, we have confined ourselves to just one type of
evidence – evidence derived from people’s intuitions.
Philosophers who have discussed lay intuitions in this area tend to say either that folk
intuitions conform to compatibilism or that they conform to incompatibilism. Our actual
findings were considerably more complex and perhaps more interesting. It appears that people
have both compatibilist and incompatibilist intuitions. Moreover, it appears that these different
kinds of intuitions are generated by different kinds of psychological processes. To assess the
29
importance of this finding for the debate over moral responsibility, one would have to know
precisely what sort of psychological process produced each type of intuition and how much
weight to accord to the output of each sort of process. We have begun the task of addressing
these issues here, but clearly far more remains to be done.
30
Acknowledgments
Several people gave us great feedback on an early draft of this paper. We'd like to thank John
Doris, Chris Hitchcock, Bob Kane, Neil Levy, Al Mele, Stephen Morris, Thomas Nadelhoffer,
Eddy Nahmias, Derk Pereboom, Lynne Rudder-Baker, Tamler Sommers, Jason Turner, and
Manuel Vargas. Thanks also to John Fischer for posting a draft of this paper on the Garden of
Forking Paths weblog (http://gfp.typepad.com/). Versions of this paper were delivered at the
UNC/Duke workshop on Naturalized Ethics, the Society for Empirical Ethics, the Society for
Philosophy and Psychology, Yale University, the University of Arizona, and the Inland
Northwest Philosophy Conference. We thank the participants for their helpful comments.
Notes:
1 Actually, compatibilists and incompatibilists argue both (1) about whether determinism is
compatible with moral responsibility and (2) about whether determinism is compatible with free
will. As Fischer (1999) has emphasized, these two questions are logically independent. One
might maintain that determinism is compatible with moral responsibility but not with free will.
Here, however, our concern lies entirely with the first of the two questions — whether
determinism is compatible with moral responsibility.
2 We use the term ‘theory’ here loosely to refer to an internally represented body of information.
Also, when we claim that the folk have an incompatibilist theory, we are not suggesting that this
theory has a privileged status over the psychological systems that generate compatibilist
intuitions. As will be apparent, we think that it remains an open question whether the system
that generates incompatibilist intuitions has a privileged status.
31
3 One virtue of Nahmias and colleagues’ question about moral responsibility is that the notion of
‘moral responsibility’ is supposed to be common between philosophers and the folk. That is,
philosophers tend to assume that the notion of moral responsibility deployed in philosophy
closely tracks the notion that people express when they attribute moral responsibility.
Furthermore, incompatibilists often specify that the relevant incompatibilist notion of free will is
precisely the notion of free will that is required for moral responsibility (e.g., Campbell 1951).
Nahmias and colleagues also ask questions about whether the agent in the deterministic scenario
“acts of his own free will,” and they find that people give answers consonant with compatibilism.
We find these results less compelling. For the expression ‘free will’ has become a term of
philosophical art, and it’s unclear how to interpret lay responses concerning such technical terms.
Moreover, incompatibilists typically grant that there are compatibilist notions of freedom that get
exploited by the folk. Incompatibilists just maintain that there is also a commonsense notion of
freedom that is not compatibilist.
4 Although these results from Viney and colleagues are suggestive, the measure used for
identifying determinists is too liberal, and as a result, the group of subjects coded as
‘determinists’ might well include indeterminists. (See McIntyre et al. 1984 for a detailed
description of the measure.) It remains to be seen whether this result will hold up using better
measures for identifying determinists.
5 A related problem for the incompatibilist concerns the history of philosophy – if
incompatibilism is intuitive, why has compatibilism been so popular among the great
philosophers in history? An incompatibilist-friendly explanation is given in Nichols
(forthcoming).
32
6 In our deterministic scenario, we say that given the past, each decision has to happen the way
that it does. This scenario allows us to test folk intuitions about the type of compatibilism most
popular in contemporary philosophy. Most contemporary compatibilists argue, following
Frankfurt (1969), that an agent can be morally responsible for her behavior even if she had to act
the way she did. (As we shall see, most subjects in our concrete condition give responses that
conform to this view.) However, it would also be possible for a compatibilist to maintain that (1)
we can never be responsible for an event that had to occur the way it did but also that (2) even if
a particular behavior is determined to occur by the laws of nature, the agent does not necessarily
have to perform that behavior. Our experiment does not address the possibility that the folk
subscribe to this type of compatibilism. With any luck, that possibility will be investigated in
future research.
7 It will, of course, be important to investigate whether our results extend to other populations.
However, as we will stress throughout, we are primarily looking at how subjects from the same
population give different answers in the different conditions.
8 χ2 (1, N=41) = 6.034, p< .05, two-tailed.
9 We also ran an experiment that used a more real-world kind of case than the deterministic set
up described in our main experiments. This was sparked by some perceptive comments from
Daniel Batson, who also gave us extremely helpful suggestions in designing the study. Again,
the idea was to test whether abstract conditions were more likely to generate incompatibilist
responses than affect-laden concrete conditions. All subjects were told about a genetic condition
that leads a person to perform horrible actions, but they were also told that there is now an
inexpensive pill that counteracts the condition and that now everyone with the condition gets this
pill. In the abstract condition, subjects were then asked to indicate whether the people who had
33
this condition before the pill was created could be held morally responsible for their actions. In
the concrete condition, subjects were told that Bill had this condition before the pill was
invented, and Bill killed his wife and children to be with his secretary. Subjects were then asked
to indicate whether Bill was morally responsible for his action. The results were quite clear, and
they were in concert with all of our earlier findings. Subjects given the abstract question gave
significantly lower ratings of responsibility than subjects given the concrete question. Thus, the
basic effect can be obtained using quite different materials.
10 As far as we know, no prior research has posited a moral responsibility module, but there has
been considerable enthusiasm for the more general idea that many basic cognitive capacities are
driven by modules (Fodor 1983; Leslie 1994), and a number of authors have suggested that
certain aspects of moral judgment might be subserved by module-like mechanisms (Dwyer 1999;
Harman 1999; Hauser forthcoming).
11 We are grateful to Jesse Prinz for suggesting this possibility.
12 As in our previous experiments, the vast majority of subjects said that our universe was most
similar to the indeterminist universe. We suspect that being a determinist might actually lead
people to have more compatibilist views (see Nichols 2006), and as a result, we antecedently
decided to exclude the minority who gave the determinist response from our statistical analyses.
The statistical details are as follows. The contrast between high and low affect for the
determinist condition was significant (χ2 (1, N=44) = 8.066, p<.01). That is, people were more
likely to say that it’s possible for the rapist to be fully morally responsible. The contrast between
the two high affect conditions was also significant (χ2 (1, N=45) = 7.204, p<.01); that is, people
were more likely to say that it’s possible that the rapist is fully morally responsible in the
indeterminist universe. The contrast between the two low affect conditions was very highly
34
significant (χ2 (1, N=45) = 26.492, p<0.0001). Subjects were dramatically more likely to say
that it’s possible for the tax cheat to be fully morally responsible in the indeterminist universe.
13 The distinction between modularity hypotheses and affective hypotheses first entered the
philosophical literature in the context of the debate about the role of moral considerations in
intentional action (Knobe forthcoming, Malle and Nelson 2003, Nadelhoffer forthcoming;
Young et al. forthcoming). In that context, modularity hypotheses are usually regarded as
vindicating folk intuitions. However, there is a key difference between that context and the
present one. The difference is that information about the moral status of the action might be
accessible in an intentional action module, but information about determinism is unlikely to be
accessible in a moral responsibility module.
14 The design of the pilot study was modeled on the initial experiments described in section 3.
Participants were asked both the high affect (Bill stabbing his wife) and the abstract questions
(counterbalanced for order). They then answered the reflective equilibrium question:
Previous research indicates that when people are given question 3 above, they often say
that Bill is fully morally responsible for killing his family. But when people are given
question 2 above, most people say that it is not possible that people in Universe A are
fully morally responsible for their actions. Clearly these claims are not consistent.
Because if it is not possible to be fully morally responsible in Universe A, then Bill can’t
be fully morally responsible.
We are interested in how people will resolve this inconsistency. So, regardless of how
you answered questions 2 and 3, please indicate which of the following you agree with
most:
35
i. In Universe A, it is not possible for people to be morally responsible for their
actions.
ii. Bill, who is in universe A, is fully morally responsible for killing his family.
15 There were 19 subjects. Of these, 10 gave incompatibilist response to the reflective
equilibrium question; 9 gave compatibilist responses.
36
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