Very interesting paper up at the papers page of Garden of Forking Paths. "Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?" (Note that it is a Word file rather than a PDF) It's basically an attack on incompatibilism not from the usual routes, but from the view of intuitions. Those of you who've followed the free will debate in Mormonism here know that a lot of the arguments ends up hinging on intuitions regarding what we mean by terms. While I doubt this will resolve anything, I think it is quite relevant.
Incompatibilists believe that the freedom associated with moral responsibility is impossible if determinism is true, and they often claim that this is the natural view to take given that it is purportedly supported by ordinary intuitions. In this paper, we challenge the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive to most laypersons, and we discuss the significance of this challenge to the free will debate. In doing so, we first argue that it is particularly important for incompatibilists that their view of free will is intuitive given that it is more metaphysically demanding than compatibilist alternatives (§1). We then suggest that determining whether incompatibilism is in fact intuitive calls for empirical testing of pretheoretical judgments about relevant cases (§2). We therefore carried out some empirical studies of our own, and the results put significant pressure on the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive to the majority of laypersons (§3). Having examined the relevant data, we consider several potential objections to our approach and show why they fail to get incompatibilists off the hook (§4). We conclude that while our preliminary data suggest that incompatibilism is not as intuitive as incompatibilists have traditionally assumed, more work should be done both to determine what ordinary intuitions about free will and moral responsibility actually are and to understand what role these intuitions should play in the free will debate.
I'm somewhat persuaded by the argument you and Steve and others have made that predicting the distant future in world where Libertarian Free Will is accurate (as asserted and without other more causal factors in play) may be more than difficult... It may be impossible (though not as obviously impossible as reconciling a fixed future with free agency). I'll write a post soon fleshing out my new theory of a world where some determinism is at play but where free will can be an independent, proactive first cause too.
Clark: It is important to note the prior and countvailing study of by Nichols and Knobe that taks the opposite view and can be found at the Garden of Forking paths here.
I'd actually read the discussion and have read both papers. I'd add thought that Nichols and Knobe only assert intuitions of incompatibilism with respect to moral responsibility but say that the intuitions are for compatibilism for other questions. Indeed part of their paper is the attempt to answer why there is that kind of distinction.
Our hypothesis is that people subscribe to an incompatibilist theory of moral responsibility but that other subsystems within their minds can lead them to arrive at compatibilist judgments in certain contexts. ...people's responses to questions about moral responsibility can vary dramatically depending on the way 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.
I should note that this parallels my own experience in discussions. People are initially "naive" compatibilists until you point out some problems and bring the discussion to a more abstract level. Then most become incompatabilist.
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