Below are links to some recent papers that include research on attitudes and beliefs about free will, determinism, and moral responsibility (my thanks to the Garden of Forking Paths for listing these). Ideally, a large cross-sectional population survey on free will should be conducted to see how beliefs about it vary by demographics, economic strata, education, and religious affiliation.
Having surveyed the proposed criteria of explanatory adequacy, Mike Beyer suggested that they could be synthesized into four essential principles. He wrote:
Courtesy of physicist Brian Greene, who questions the idea that the future is open, and neuroscientist V. S.
To some extent we’re all ideologues, at least in a passive sense. We’re all reluctant to let go of beliefs central to our worldview, even if the evidence is against us. Belief in god is notoriously difficult to abandon if it’s played a central role in your life, giving you reassurance and meaning. You don’t have to have been an active ideologue – a “blindly partisan advocate or adherent” of religion – for admitting you’re wrong to be a wrenching process.
In a review of Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion for Christianity Today, Notre Dame philosopher Alvin Plantinga argues that naturalism is “self-defeating and cannot rationally be believed.” If, as naturalists claim, there’s no god guiding the evolutionary process, then there’s no reason to think our cognitive faculties are reliable in giving us true beliefs about the world. Since we can’t trust our cognitive faculties, any conclusion we reach about the world is untrustworthy, including the claim that evolution is unguided. Therefore naturalism about evolution (and everything else) is self-defeating and must be given up. For us to trust our own beliefs (and we must, mustn’t we?) God must exist, and must have guided evolution.
In a wonderfully written monograph (a book, really), Metaphysics By Default, Wayne Stewart presents an independently developed thesis directly parallel to the argument in Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity (DNS). Without having encountered my paper, he uses very much the same thought experiment to support the intuition of generic subjective continuity, what he calls “existential passage” (see in particular Chapter 9).&
Punitive and ineffective criminal justice policies find attitudinal support in the belief in free will, the idea that offenders are essentially self-made and therefore deserving of harsh punishments, including death. Changing beliefs about free will can soften punitive attitudes and build support for addressing the actual causes of crime. To change beliefs about free will and build support for criminal justice reform, it is proposed that public education on causality and crime be undertaken by a credible group of multi-disciplinary experts.
