scholarly journals The Correlates and Consequences of Believing in Free Will

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Melissa Snater
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
Close Connection ◽  
Empirical Results ◽  
Helping Behaviour ◽  
Widespread Belief ◽  
Opposing Camp ◽  
Beliefs And Attitudes

<p>Research has indicated that weakening people’s belief in free will may likewise weaken their belief in moral responsibility and potentially license them to morally transgress. Recent studies in social psychology suggest that diminished belief in free will is associated with a range of anti-social or otherwise negative outcomes. For example, cheating, unjustified aggression, and less prosocial helping behaviour. In response to these findings, illusionist philosophers have recommended that even if scientists somehow conclusively showed that free will does not exist it might nevertheless be necessary to foster widespread belief as a useful-fiction. In the opposing camp, free will disillusionists maintain that belief in free will has a dark side that we would be better off without. The problem they say, is the close connection between free will and the belief that people justly deserve what they get. So rather than having the instrumental benefits that illusionists claim, belief in free will is too often taken to justify treating people in severe and demeaning ways. Who then is correct? I report empirical results comparing the beliefs and attitudes of free will sceptics and people naïve to the debate. Results are consistent with the claims of disillusionists. Free will sceptics are more compassionate, and are less likely to believe in just deserts and harbour retributive attitudes.</p>

scholarly journals The Correlates and Consequences of Believing in Free Will

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Melissa Snater
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
Close Connection ◽  
Empirical Results ◽  
Helping Behaviour ◽  
Widespread Belief ◽  
Opposing Camp ◽  
Beliefs And Attitudes

<p>Research has indicated that weakening people’s belief in free will may likewise weaken their belief in moral responsibility and potentially license them to morally transgress. Recent studies in social psychology suggest that diminished belief in free will is associated with a range of anti-social or otherwise negative outcomes. For example, cheating, unjustified aggression, and less prosocial helping behaviour. In response to these findings, illusionist philosophers have recommended that even if scientists somehow conclusively showed that free will does not exist it might nevertheless be necessary to foster widespread belief as a useful-fiction. In the opposing camp, free will disillusionists maintain that belief in free will has a dark side that we would be better off without. The problem they say, is the close connection between free will and the belief that people justly deserve what they get. So rather than having the instrumental benefits that illusionists claim, belief in free will is too often taken to justify treating people in severe and demeaning ways. Who then is correct? I report empirical results comparing the beliefs and attitudes of free will sceptics and people naïve to the debate. Results are consistent with the claims of disillusionists. Free will sceptics are more compassionate, and are less likely to believe in just deserts and harbour retributive attitudes.</p>

Does Situationism Threaten Free Will and Moral Responsibility?

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (6) ◽  
pp. 698-733 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael McKenna ◽  
Brandon Warmke
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Ethical Theory ◽  
Situational Influences ◽  
Reasons Responsiveness ◽  
The Face ◽  
Gilbert Harman

The situationist movement in social psychology has caused a considerable stir in philosophy. Much of this was prompted by the work of Gilbert Harman and John Doris. Both contended that familiar philosophical assumptions about the role of character in the explanation of action were not supported by experimental results. Most of the ensuing philosophical controversy has focused upon issues related to moral psychology and ethical theory. More recently, the influence of situationism has also given rise to questions regarding free will and moral responsibility. There is cause for concern that a range of situationist findings are in tension with the reasons-responsiveness putatively required for free will and moral responsibility. We develop and defend a response to the alleged situationist threat to free will and moral responsibility that we call pessimistic realism. We conclude on an optimistic note, exploring the possibility of strengthening our agency in the face of situational influences.

Lesse Greeke? Homer in Jonson and Shakespeare

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert S. Miola
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
Julius Caesar ◽  
Troilus And Cressida ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Love's Labor's Lost ◽  
And Function

Throughout their careers both Jonson and Shakespeare often encountered Homer, who left a deep impress on their works. Jonson read Homer directly in Greek but Shakespeare did not, or if he did, he left no evidence of that reading in extant works. Both Jonson and Shakespeare encountered Homer indirectly in Latin recollections by Vergil, Horace, Ovid and others, in English translations, in handbooks and mythographies, in derivative poems and plays, in descendant traditions, and in plentiful allusions. Though their appropriations differ significantly, Jonson and Shakespeare both present comedic impersonations of Homeric scenes and figures – the parodic replay of the council of the gods (Iliad 1) in Poetaster (1601) 4.5 and the appearance of “sweet warman” Hector (5.2.659) in the Masque of the Nine Worthies (Love's Labor's Lost, 1588–97). Homer's Vulcan and Venus furnish positive depictions of love and marriage in The Haddington Masque (1608) as do his Hector and Andromache in Julius Caesar (1599), which features other significant recollections. Both Jonson and Shakespeare recall Homer to explore the dark side of honor and fame: Circe and Ate supply the anti-masque in the Masque of Queens (1609), and scenes from Chapman's Iliad supply the comical or tragical satire, Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601). Both poets put Homer to abstract and philosophical uses: Zeus's chain and Venus's ceston (girdle), allegorized, appears throughout Jonson's work and function as central symbols in Hymenaei (1606); Homer's depiction of the tension between fate and free will, between the omnipotent gods and willing humans, though mediated, inflects the language and action of Coriolanus (c. 1608). Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare practice a kind of inventive imitatio which, according to classical and neo-classical precept, re-reads classical texts in order to make them into something new.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Evan Franklin
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Causal Role ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Agent Causation ◽  
The Right

This chapter lays out the book’s central question: Assuming agency reductionism—that is, the thesis that the causal role of the agent in all agential activities is reducible to the causal role of states and events involving the agent—is it possible to construct a defensible model of libertarianism? It is explained that most think the answer is negative and this is because they think libertarians must embrace some form of agent-causation in order to address the problems of luck and enhanced control. The thesis of the book is that these philosophers are mistaken: it is possible to construct a libertarian model of free will and moral responsibility within an agency reductionist framework that silences that central objections to libertarianism by simply taking the best compatibilist model of freedom and adding indeterminism in the right junctures of human agency. A brief summary of the chapters to follow is given.

Reactive Attitudes Revisited: A Modest Revision

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Deigh
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Reactive Attitudes

The essay offers an interpretation of P. F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” on which attributions of moral responsibility presuppose a practice of holding people morally responsible for their actions, and what explains the practice is our liability to such reactive attitudes as resentment and indignation. The interpretation is offered to correct a common misinterpretation of Strawson’s essay. On this common misinterpretation, attributions of moral responsibility are implicit in the reactive attitudes of resentment and indignation, and consequently our liability to these attitudes cannot explain these attributions. The reason this is a misinterpretation of Strawson’s essay is that Strawson’s compatibilist solution to the free will problem requires that our liability to the reactive attitudes be conceptually prior to our attributions of moral responsibility.

Moral Responsibility, Socially Embedded

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Herzog
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Shared Responsibility ◽  
The Face ◽  
Moral Theorizing ◽  
The Impact

This chapter asks whether we can hold on to the picture of the morally responsible subject as we knew it in the face of evidence from social psychology about the impact of contexts on human behaviour. Some theorists have taken this to present a major challenge to moral theorizing. However, the chapter argues that, while we should acknowledge the malleability of human behaviour, we should not give up the notion of responsible agency. Rather, we need to broaden our theoretical horizon in order to include individuals’ co-responsibility for the contexts in which they act. This argument is a general one, but it is of particular relevance for organizations: it is our shared responsibility to turn them into contexts in which moral agency is supported rather than undermined.

Effect of Power on Moral Judgment

1978 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 387-394
Author(s):  
Russell Hamby
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Low Power ◽  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Factorial Design ◽  
High Power ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Need For Power ◽  
Experimenter Effects

Ambiguous effects of power on attributions of moral responsibility for an accident are interpreted to result from the intervening effects of need for power, which is aroused by the anticipation of exercising power over another. 160 subjects from introductory social psychology classes participated in a questionnaire-type experiment comparing effects of high/low carelessness, severe/minor consequences, and high/low power of the attributor in a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design. In a follow-up experiment 30 subjects were assigned to conditions of high or low power, and their needs for power and moral attributions were measured. High power seemed to arouse need for power, which was curvilinearly related to moral judgments. Those high and low in need for power attributed more moral responsibility to the perpetrator of an accident than those with moderate levels of need for power. The results suggest complicated models of both moral judgments and experimenter effects related to the level or arousal of motivations.

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