Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy

Volume 23, 2018

Metaphysics

Chris Weigel
Pages 111-116

Free Will: A Case of Perspective

Successor views in the free will literature are views that reject the assumption behind the compatibility question, the question of whether free will is compatible with causal determinism. Specifically, they challenge the assumption that the compatibility question must be answered with either a yes or a no (in the exclusive sense of “or”). One premise typically found in arguments for successor views is the premise that there are certain challenging cases where we have compatibilist and incompatibilist intuitions within the same case. This paper gives empirical support for that premise by presenting an experiment that yields an actor-observer asymmetry in intuitions about the compatibility questions. Given causal determinism, intuitions are incompatibilist when we think about someone else doing an action, but intuitions are compatibilist when we think about our own action as judged by someone else.