Abstract

In “The Free-Will Intuitions Scale and the Question of Natural Compatibilism,” Deery, Davis, and Carey recommend that experimental philosophers employ a new methodology for determining the extent to which the folk are natural compatibilists about free will and moral responsibility. While I agree that the general methodology that the authors developed holds great promise for improving our understanding of folk attitudes about free will and moral responsibility, I am much less enthusiastic about some of the conclusions that they reached on the basis of the particular studies they ran. Key among these are that the folk harbor some compatibilist intuitions and that the findings of both Nichols and Knobe , on the one hand, and Nahmias and Murray , on the other, are undermined by their reliance upon a particular formulation of determinism in the cases they presented to their subjects