“Escape from Freedom”: Authoritarianism-related traits,political ideology,personality, and belief in free will/determinism

Philosophers have long speculated that authoritarianism and belief in determinism are functionally related. To evaluate this hypothesis, we assessed whether authoritarianism and allied personality and political variables predict varieties of belief in determinism in three community samples (N₁ = 566 to 20,010; N₂ = 500; N₃ = 419). Authoritarianism and allied variables manifested moderate to large positive correlations with both fatalistic and genetic determinism beliefs. Controlling for political conservatism did not meaningfully attenuate these relations. Further, openness was negatively related to fatalistic determinism beliefs and agreeableness was negatively related to genetic determinism beliefs. Taken together, our findings clarify the nature of relations between authoritarianism and general personality, on the one hand, and free will/determinism beliefs, on the other, and suggest intriguing intersections between worldviews and personality traits.     

Moral responsibility and free will: A meta-analysis

Fundamental beliefs about free will and moral responsibility are often thought to shape our ability to have healthy relationships with others and ourselves. Emotional reactions have also been shown to have an important and pervasive impact on judgments and behaviors. Recent research suggests that emotional reactions play a prominent role in judgments about free will, influencing judgments about determinism’s relation to free will and moral responsibility. However, the extent to which affect influences these judgments is unclear. We conducted a meta-analysis to estimate the impact of affect. Our meta-analysis indicates that beliefs in free will are largely robust to emotional reactions.     

The implications of rejecting free will: An empirical analysis

While skeptical arguments concerning free will have been a common element of philosophical discourse for thousands of years, one could make the case that such arguments have never been more numerous or forceful than at present. In response to these skeptical attacks, some philosophers and psychologists have expressed concern that the widespread acceptance of such skeptical attitudes could have devastating social consequences. In this paper, I set out to address whether such concerns are well-founded. I argue that there is reason to believe that should skeptical arguments result in the widespread dismissal of human free will, the results of such a dismissal are likely to be more positive than negative.     

The weirdness of belief in free will

It has been argued that belief in free will is socially consequential and psychologically universal. In this paper we look at the folk concept of free will and its critical assessment in the context of recent psychological research. Is there a widespread consensus about the conceptual content of free will? We compared English “free will” with its lexical equivalents in Lithuanian, Hindi, Chinese and Mongolian languages and found that unlike Lithuanian, Chinese, Hindi and Mongolian lexical expressions of “free will” do not refer to the same concept free will. What kind people have been studied so far? A review of papers indicate that, overall, 91% of participants in studies on belief in free will were WEIRD. Thus, given that free will has no cross-culturally universal conceptual content and that most of the reviewed studies were based on WEIRD samples, belief in free will is not a psychological universal.     

Voluntary decision-making in addiction: A comprehensive review of existing measurement tools

The notion of voluntariness, notably the inability to refrain from using an addictive substance, is central to addiction. This review examines different constructs measuring voluntariness in the context of drug addiction. We found 117 articles featuring 123 distinct scales for 11 of the 16 constructs initially searched. Self-efficacy was by far the construct with most scales. Most scales were not specifically developed with samples of people with addictions. From a methodological standpoint, current literature jeopardizes the validity of generalizations about how voluntariness functions and is measured in people with and without a drug addiction. From the standpoint of social psychology, the study of voluntariness remains anchored in an individualistic orientation to the study of cognition and behavior, thus calling for greater crosstalk between psychology subspecialties.     

Akrasia and conflict in the Nicomachean Ethics

In Nicomachean Ethics VII, Aristotle offers an account of akrasia that purports to salvage the kernel of truth in the Socratic paradox that people act against what is best only through ignorance. Despite Aristotle’s apparent confidence in having identified the sense in which Socrates was right about akrasia, we are left puzzling over Aristotle’s own account, and the extent to which he agrees with Socrates. The most fundamental interpretive question concerns the sense in which Aristotle takes the akratic to be ignorant. The received view in the literature has been the intellectualist interpretation, which takes akratic agents to be so ignorant of the wrongness of what they do as to be unaware of it. In recent decades, many scholars have identified serious problems in this interpretation and have moved towards the non-intellectualist reading, the strong version of which takes clearheaded akrasia to be possible. There is, however, a glaring shortage of discussion of the difficulties facing the strong non-intellectualist reading. In this paper, I present what I take to be the most salient reasons for rejecting strong non-intellectualism, and argue that Aristotle’s text supports a moderate non-intellectualism, according to which clearheaded akrasia is impossible.     

Implicit attitudes and the social capacity for free will

In this paper I ask what implicit attitudes tell us about our freedom. I analyze the relation between the literature on implicit attitudes and an important subcategory of theories of free will—self-disclosure accounts. If one is committed to such a theory, I suggest one may have to move to a more social conceptualization of the capacity for freedom. I will work out this argument in five sections. In the first section, I discuss the specific theories of free will that are central to this paper. In the second section, I will show that implicit-bias research raises questions about people’s capacities to exercise (these specific understandings of) free will. In the third section, I will consider how an individual may overcome these failures and argue that the individual ability for self-regulation is significantly limited. One could stop here and conclude that free will is a limited capacity. But I argue that this conclusion would be too hastily drawn. I will instead continue to ask what would be required for free will. By discussing how failures of free will are due to social structures and may be therefore repaired by changing social structures in section 4, I will arrive at an alternative conclusion about the capacity for free will in section 5.     

道德:自由意志的内在定在——黑格尔《法哲学原理》读书札记

道德是不同于外在法的内在法 ,自由意志在个人意志中的具体存在即为道德。道德不仅是主观精神 ,更是能行动的意志。