Compatibilism can be natural.
Compatibilism is the view that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism. Natural compatibilism is the view that in ordinary social cognition, people are compatibilists. Researchers have recently debated whether natural compatibilism is true. This paper presents six experiments (N=909) that advance this debate. The results provide the best evidence to date for natural compatibilism, avoiding the main methodological problems faced by previous work supporting the view. In response to simple scenarios about familiar activities, people judged that agents had moral responsibilities to perform actions that they were unable to perform (Experiment 1), were morally responsible for unavoidable outcomes (Experiment 2), were to blame for unavoidable outcomes (Experiments 3-4), deserved blame for unavoidable outcomes (Experiment 5), and should suffer consequences for unavoidable outcomes (Experiment 6). These findings advance our understanding of moral psychology and philosophical debates that depend partly on patterns in commonsense morality.
Philosophy Department and Cognitive Science Program, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, Ontario N2L3G1, Canada. Electronic address: john.turri@gmail.com.
John
J
Turri
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009014:Morals; D012938:Social Perception; D055815:Young Adult
Agency; Determinism; Folk metaphysics; Moral psychology; Responsibility