Free will, folk intuitions, and person standpoints: Evidence from experiments

This pushes the so-called “experimental philosophers” to assign importance to experimental studies on folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. This paper aims to disclose an important factor that affects the formation of intuitions about free will and moral responsibility, which has been dismissed in the debate.

Namely, individual perspectival differences have been overlooked: people may regard the presence or absence of free will and moral responsibility from their own internal point of view (subjective) or from an external (objective) point of view. In two experiments, we demonstrate the effects of the perspectival differences on the formation of beliefs about free will and moral responsibility. The results of our experiments show that apparently compatibilist intuitions about free will and moral responsibility are prompted by adopting the first- and second-person standpoints rather than the third-person standpoint.