Introduction PART I: METAPHYSICS AND COMMITMENT: Libertarianism, action, and self-determination Kant and commitment Commitment, illusion, and truth Non-rational commitment: a view of freedom Phenomenology, commitment, and what might happen PART II: THE OBJECTIVIST BASIS: Objectivism: preliminaries Choice Self-consciousness PART III: THE SUBJECTIVIST CHALLENGE: Evidence and independence Contravention and convention The spectator subject and integration The natural epictetans The experience of ability to choose Subjectivism and the experience of freedom Anitomy and truth Appendices.

Freedom and Belief.

Belief in free will is a pervasive phenomenon that has important consequences for prosocial actions and punitive judgments, but little research has investigated why free will beliefs are so widespread. Across 5 studies using experimental, survey, and archival data and multiple measures of free will belief, we tested the hypothesis that a key factor promoting belief in free will is a fundamental desire to hold others morally responsible for their wrongful behaviors. In Study 1, participants reported greater belief in free will after considering an immoral action than a morally neutral one. Study 2 provided evidence that this effect was due to heightened punitive motivations. In a field experiment (Study 3), an ostensibly real classroom cheating incident led to increased free will beliefs, again due to heightened punitive motivations. In Study 4, reading about others’ immoral behaviors reduced the perceived merit of anti-free-will research, thus demonstrating the effect with an indirect measure of free will belief. Finally, Study 5 examined this relationship outside the laboratory and found that the real-world prevalence of immoral behavior (as measured by crime and homicide rates) predicted free will belief on a country level. Taken together, these results provide a potential explanation for the strength and prevalence of belief in free will: It is functional for holding others morally responsible and facilitates justifiably punishing harmful members of society.

Free to punish: a motivated account of free will belief.

Many philosophical problems are rooted in everyday thought, and experimental philosophy uses social scientific techniques to study the psychological underpinnings of such problems. In the case of free will, research suggests that people in a diverse range of cultures reject determinism, but people give conflicting responses on whether determinism would undermine moral responsibility. When presented with abstract questions, people tend to maintain that determinism would undermine responsibility, but when presented with concrete cases of wrongdoing, people tend to say that determinism is consistent with moral responsibility. It remains unclear why people reject determinism and what drives people's conflicted attitudes about responsibility. Experimental philosophy aims to address these issues and thereby illuminate the philosophical problem of free will.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/331/6023/1401.full.pdf

Experimental Philosophy and the Problem of Free Will

term used to frame the process of transition from an apartheid regime to a new “rainbow nation” and an African renaissance. There is no consensus on what ubuntu actually means, and the precise content of the concept is still contested. The translations range from “humanity” and “charity” to “common sense” and “generosity.” Often ubuntu is seen as a concept enshrined in a traditional philosophy of life, although one needs to further differentiate between ubuntu as a moral quality of a person or as a way of living. The core meaning of the concept ubuntu is frequently expressed using the Zulu-Xhosa aphorism “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” – “A human being is a human being through other people.” meaning that every human being needs other people in order to be human; every person is part of a whole, integrated into a comprehensive network of mutual dependencies. The aphorism expresses “the African idea of persons: persons exist only in relation to other persons. The human self . . . only exists in relationship to its surroundings; these relationships are what it is. And the most important of these are the relationships we have with other persons” (Shutte 2001, 23). Thus, the aphorism refers to the deep relational character of ubuntu and underlines at the same time that human beings (umuntu) are a “being

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The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Relativism

Some people believe more than others in free will, and researchers have both measured and manipulated those beliefs Disbelief in free will has been shown to cause dishonest, selfish, aggressive, and conforming behavior, and to reduce helpfulness, learning from one's misdeeds, thinking for oneself, recycling, expectations for occupational success, and actual quality of performance on the job Belief in free will has been shown to have only modest or negligible correlations with other variables, indicating that it is a distinct trait Belief in free will has correlated positively with life satisfaction and finding life meaningful, with self-efficacy and self-control, with low levels of stress, and (though not entirely consistently) with internal locus of control High belief in free will has been linked to a punitive attitude toward wrongdoers and lower forgiveness toward them The belief seems to involve a sense of agency and expecting others to behave in morally responsible fashion

Believing versus Disbelieving in Free Will: Correlates and Consequences

Recent experimental research has revealed surprising patterns in people's intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. One limitation of this research, however, is that it has been conducted exclusively on people from Western cultures. The present paper extends previous research by presenting a cross-cultural study examining intuitions about free will and moral responsibility in subjects from the United States, Hong Kong, India and Colombia. The results revealed a striking degree of cross- cultural convergence. In all four cultural groups, the majority of participants said that (a) our universe is indeterministic and (b) moral responsibility is not compatible with determinism. The question of free will is one of the oldest and most intractable in the history of Western philosophy; philosophers are still arguing about how best to answer it. But recent experimental research on the topic has arrived at a surprising result. Although philosophers remain divided about how to address the question of free will, it seems that a substantial majority of ordinary people have somehow converged on a single basic view. What's more, they seem to embrace a thesis—usually called incompatibilism—that most philosophers are prone to reject. Even while this research is suggestive, it suffers from an important limitation—all of the studies have been conducted on subjects in the United States. This opens up the possibility that the existing results merely reflect some idiosyncratic property of contemporary Western culture. To address this worry, we conducted a cross- cultural study of intuitions about free will. Our aim was to determine whether previous results merely pointed to some aspect of one particular culture or whether these results really were pointing to some more fundamental truth about the way people think about human freedom.

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Is Belief in Free Will a Cultural Universal

In this article, we present evidence that in four different cultural groups that speak quite different languages (Brazil, India, Japan, and the USA) there are cases of justified true beliefs that are not judged to be cases of knowledge. We hypothesize that this intuitive judgment, which we call “the Gettier intuition,” may be a reflection of an underlying innate and universal core folk epistemology, and we highlight the philosophical significance of its universality.

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Gettier Across Cultures1

Gettier cases describe situations where an agent possesses a justified true belief that p, without, at least according to mainstream analytic epistemology, knowing that p, while the “Gettier intuition” is the judgment that a protagonist in a Gettier case does not know the relevant proposition. Our goal in this chapter is to show that we can make the Gettier intuition compelling or underwhelming by presenting it in different contexts. We report a surprising order effect whereby people find the Gettier intuition less compelling when a case describing a justified but false belief is presented before a Gettier case. We also report a surprising framing effect: two Gettier cases that differ only in their philosophically irrelevant narrative details elicit substantially different judgments. Finally, we discuss the metaphilosophical implications of these effects.

Gettier Was Framed

In the fifth century c.e. , Diṇnāga introduced a distinction between inferencefor-oneself (svarthānumāna) and inference-for-others (parārthānumāna) , which was adopted by all later pramāṇa theorists. A reevaluation of this well-known distinction has led us to some philosophically significant theses, which we propose to discuss here. Many scholars have already pointed out that (a) the aim of the Buddhists in developing a theory of inference was different from that of a formal logician; (b) svarthānumāna falls in the domain of psychology of reasoning, while parārthānumāna falls in the domain of logic proper; and (c) parārthānumāna should be considered a model-theoretic as opposed to a prooftheoretic enterprise. In consonance with these views, it is aimed to show that (1) Diṇnāga's account of good inferential process leading to sound inference as laid down in the Hetucakaraḍamaru is very similar to the Mental Model Theory proposed by P. N. Johnson-Laird and others, and (2) although Jonardon Ganeri's reinterpretation of the early Nyāya inference as a type of case-based reasoning may be extended to the Buddhist parārthānumāna , the most plausible reinterpretation of svārthānumāna can be given in terms of mental models.

Smita Sirker

Papers

Is Belief in Free Will a Cultural Universal

Gettier Across Cultures1

Gettier Was Framed

Diṅnāga and Mental Models: A Reconstruction