I really want to be careful to stay away (for now) from substantive debates about freedom and determinism as philosophical issues. The debate with which I’m interacting here actually has very little to do with the concerns you raise; rather, we’re just trying to get our hands on the intuitions of ordinary Joe’s and Jane’s about the (in)compatibility of freedom and determinism. Incompatibilists often begin defenses of their position by pointing out how intuitive it is (and/or how counter-intuitive compatibilism is). (To be sure, some compatibilists even concede that the default intuitive position is that freedom and determinism are incompatible). So a number of philosophers have taken to polling the folk in order to actually see if incompatibilism is as “intuitive” as so many assume. Their results indicate that it isn’t; I’m just trying to challenge these results. So to be clear, I’m not challenging compatibilism as a philosophical thesis; nor am I defending incompatibilism as a philosophical thesis.

However, as the beginning of a response to your concerns, I suppose I’d ask: why suppose that the lines are to be drawn the way you’ve drawn them, even if just initially? You seem to just assume that if a system is not completely determined, then it must be completely random. Sure, fleshing out what libertarian free will actually looks like may indeed be an awkward and difficult task, but to begin by simply stipulating that the denial of determinism just is randomness seems to really stack the deck unfairly against the libertarian.

Anyway, this is the sort of discussion that I probably ought to reserve for a different post.

I don’t want to confuse two very different issues here (and part of the confusion probably has a lot to do with my poorly-worded post). On the one hand, there’s the issue of whether or not “determinism rules out genuine deliberation.” I think this is a really interesting question, and while I’m actually inclined to agree with you that it doesn’t, I have this yet-unshaken worry that determinism takes something very significant away from the relationship that we ordinarily assume exists between deliberation and action. I’m interested to read that Coffman/Warfield paper.

On the other hand, there’s the issue of whether or not the folk conceive of determinism as ruling out genuine deliberation. This is the question I’m more interested in addressing (for now, at least), since the whole focus of this recent experimental stuff is on what the folk think. If it turns out that the folk do not conceive of determined agents as capable of genuine deliberation, then the tension that I highlight in my post arises.

If an experiment were run in which the folk were given the Jill case, but the word “decides” was removed from both the story and the questions, and the number of affirmative responses (i.e., those suggesting that she does steal the necklace freely) drops significantly, then I think (at the very least) a step will have been taken toward showing that the original experiment was biased (if even slightly) in the way I suggest in my post.

Then, if another experiment were run in which the folk were given the Jill case, but this time both (a) the word “decides” was removed from both the story and the questions and (b) something like the following sentence was added to the end of the story . . .

To be clear, at the moment that Jill steals the necklace, she could not possibly have done anything else, given the initial conditions of the universe and its laws of nature.

. . . and the number of “she acted freely” responses takes an even more significant dip, then I think one will have gone a long way toward challenging the conclusions of Eddy et al, since participants’ unwillingness to call Jill free would be tracking the extent to which it is made obvious to them that she is determined (and lacks alternative possibilities in the incompatibilist sense).

Anyway, that’s what I’m thinking. Let me know what you think when you get the chance.

So are you a PAC 10 football fan yet? You don’t have a poster of Pete Carroll hanging in your home, do you?

From my perspective it seems illicit to just assume that determinism rules out genuine deliberation. Historically the free will debate hasn’t be about whether or not determinism rules out our agency but whether it rules out our free agency. But that being said, I think that your experiments sound fairly interesting.