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Nameless1995 t1_j989f7q wrote

I personally have zero intuition about freedom, control, responsibility. I am more of an outsider who can play along with the "tune", and play "games" with the words, but I don't have any clear intelligible sense of them, beyond the rules of how some of the words get used in certain language games. Even then the rules are ill-defined and fuzzy in most contexts. I share very little intuition with most philosophers.

> First, notice that one of the main reasons anyone cares about free will is that it seems to be a requirement for moral responsibility. What you do can only be your fault, or conversely to your credit, if it’s under your control.

How do I notice it? How do you notice it? Have you taken an empirical survey? Some psychological experiment as to what anyone "truly" cares for? Have we find some cross-cultural and cross-temporal invariances (beyond WEIRD)?

Philosophers like to sneak in loaded statements about "this is common sense" "this is what we care for" here and there. As Lance Bush says, philosophy is often psychology with a sample size = 1.

There are some approaches in experimental philosophy seeking more into these questions but a lot can depend on how the questions are framed, and results seem somewhat mixed (people have both compatibilist and incompatibilist intuition) from the last time I check.

So I overall experience a tension here, it seems like the investigation as to what we really care for (at a statistical level -- otherwise what we care for in regards to "free will" is very unlikely to invariant accross individuals -- I have a discussion long ago with someone who really really wanted true randomness for freedom), and what should be called 'free will' if they are properly constrained into well-defined problems turns into questions of psychology, anthropology and such. I am not sure what philosophy is left to do. Perhaps, then people should use philosophical tool to create their own conceptual boundaries to track what they personally care for and analyze if such a thing is coherent and if there is good warrant for believing them. Philosophers, can then, simply "list" different conceptions that reflective people (philosophers) have considered and objectively discuss what we gain and lose from each, instead of forcing one as uniquely "true" or consistent with what people, in general, care of (that's psychology). We can perhaps then have some voting process as to which conception to choose or prefer. Or we can discuss some clear evaluation criterion (eg. from a conceptual engineering perspective).

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