Are the Folk Agent-Causationists?

JASON TURNER AND EDDY NAHMIAS

Abstract: Experimental examination of how the folk conceptualize certain philosophically loaded notions can provide information useful for philosophical theorizing. In this paper, we explore issues raised in Shaun Nichols (2004) studies involving peoples conception of free will, focusing on his claim that this conception ts best with the philosophical theory of agent-causation. We argue that his data do not support this conclusion, highlighting along the way certain considerations that ought to be taken into account when probing the folk conception of free will.

1. Introduction In The folk psychology of free will: ts and starts (2004), Shaun Nichols employs some novel approaches in investigating the philosophical problem of free will. First, he suggests using experimental methodsrather than just armchair speculationto understand ordinary peoples conceptions of free will. Second, he presents experiments designed to elucidate these conceptions, and he suggests that the results indicate that the folk conception of free will ts the philosophical theory of agent-causation. And nally, he discusses how this conception of agent-causation may develop in children. We applaud each of these approaches and agree that it is important to understand what people think about free will, and why they think it, if we are to determine whether philosophical analyses of the concept actually accord with and account for ordinary conceptions and folk theories. Having tried this sort of experimental work ourselves (Nahmias et al., 2005), we also realize how difcult it is to effectively probe ordinary peoples views about complex topics. Nonetheless, we do think, and will argue here, that Nichols should not yet draw the conclusion that children (or adults) have a conception of free will that ts best with the philosophical theory of agent-causation. Our critiques should be understood as attempts to advance Nichols project, not to tear down what he has done so far. We hope implementing his methodology will eventually shed light on how the folk conceptualize free will; and we hope our comments here will be useful in improving this methodology and the way it is applied to the free will debate.

Thanks to Al Mele, Stephen Morris, Thomas Nadelhoffer, and Shaun Nichols for helpful comments and discussions. Address for correspondence: Department of Philosophy, 26 Nichols Ave., New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1411; Department of Philosophy, P.O. Box 4089, Atlanta, GA 30302-4089. Email: turner@philosophy.rutgers.edu; enahmias@gsu.edu
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2. The Substance of Agent-Causation As the terms are used in the philosophical literature, incompatibilists believe that free will requires the absence of determinism1 and compatibilists believe that free will is compatible with determinism. Among incompatibilists, libertarians believe that (at least some) human agents have free will, and skeptics hold that no one ever acts freely. Furthermore, while event-causal libertarians hold that indeterministic processes at the appropriate place in human decision-making are enough to secure free will, other libertarians do not. Rather, these agent-causal libertarians argue that for agents to act freely they must participate in a special sort of relation, agentcausation, which holds between a substance (the agent) and an event (the action) and which is not further reducible to a causal relation that holds between mental states of the agent and the action. Furthermore, if an agent S freely performs an action A, the agent-causal relation that holds between S and A must be such that S could have done other than A.2 Nichols thesis is that childrenand for that matter adultshave and employ an implicit conception of free will that accords with this philosophical theory of agent-causation. This does not mean that they have an explicit acceptance or representation of the theory of agent-causation. Rather, it means that their use of the relevant concepts and their intuitions about cases involving free action and the ability to do otherwise best t an agent-causal theory as opposed to any alternative theory.3 Nichols explains that the essential characteristics of this folk conception of agent-causation are the following: 1. An agent is a causal factor in the production of an action. 2. For any given action of an agent, the agent could have not caused it. Roughly, the agent could have done otherwise (p. 475). As we understand him, Nichols intends his use of agent-causation to embody the minimal requirements of the philosophical theory of agent-causation. In this case, two clarications need to be made. The rst, explicitly noted by Nichols, has

By determinism, we mean the thesis that a complete description of the laws of nature conjoined with a complete description of the state of the world at a given time entails any truth about the future (cf. van Inwagen, 1983, ch. 3). Where doing otherwise may include not doing anything at all. For recent discussions of agent-causation, see OConnor (2000) and Clarke (2003). (It is possible to hold that the special agent-causal relation is necessary for free will but the ability to do otherwise is notcf. Markosian (1999)but such a view is highly unorthodox.) We will follow Nichols convention of using the hyphenated agent-causation to refer to the technical philosophical notion. We will not take issue with Nichols on this point, but some might wonder whether children, or even many adults, have the cognitive and conceptual resources to have even an implicit conception of anything as complicated as agent-causation, or whether they have specic intuitions relevant to the complex modal issues involved in the philosophical debates about the appropriate notion of the ability to do otherwise (see below).

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to do with what is meant by could have done otherwise in condition 2. Some compatibilists offer a conditional analysis of could have done otherwise according to which S could have done otherwise than A is true if and only if, for some (particular) condition C, this counterfactual is true: Had C been the case, S would have done otherwise than A. Libertarians most emphatically do not mean that by could have done otherwise. Rather, they have an unconditional analysis in mind: agents have an ability to do otherwise such that it is possible that they do otherwise while everything (the laws of nature and the complete history of the universe) up until the moment of choice remains exactly as it was. We will return to this issue in 5. The second clarication is not explicitly noted by Nichols, and it will raise problems for his interpretation of the relevant data. If condition 1 is supposed to capture the causal criteria of agent-causation, then an agents being a causal factor in the production of an action must be understood in a very specic manner. In particular, agent-causation requires a special sort of causal relation to hold between the agent as a substance and actions, where this relation cannot be reduced to causal relations involving sub-agential components of the agent, such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. We turn to that issue now.

3. The Causal Principle and the Correlation Principle Nichols argues for claim 1 above, which he calls the Causal Principle, by reference to what he calls the Correlation Principle: 3. If there is an action, there is an agent (p. 478). He rst describes developmental evidence supporting the conclusion that children accept the Correlation Principle (pp. 478480).4 Then he argues that either (a) children have a prior belief in the Causal Principle, which is evidenced by the Correlation Principle, or (b) they infer the former from the latter. The argument that, in the absence of a prior belief in the Causal Principle, it would be inferred by the Correlation Principle, runs as follows: On the prevailing account of causal induction, regular covariation is used as evidence for causal induction it is a presupposition of causal attribution that, ceteris paribus, if an effect only occurs in the presence of a candidate cause, then that candidate cause does indeed exert causal powers over the effect. The
4

Or, at least, that childrens conception complies with the Correlation Principle; we (and Nichols) may remain neutral as to whether this amounts to full acceptance of the principle or not. For ease of exposition, we will talk about childrens acceptance of such principles throughout, although this should be understood in a way compatible with their not having an explicit representation of the principles in question.
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J. Turner and E. Nahmias Correlation Principle says that effects of the type action never occur in the absence of candidate causes of the type agent. In that case, given the above presupposition of causal attribution, the Causal Principle would follow (p. 481).

The problem with this argument is that it fails to show what Nichols needs, which is that childrens implicit conception of agent-causation has the substantial philosophical features of agent-causation. We do not dispute that children accept the Correlation Principle. Notice, however, that Nichols seems happy to equate a childs coding of an object as an agent as their coding of the object as one that has mental states (p. 479; cf. Johnson, 2000, p. 22). In this case, although it is true that, whenever an action is present, an agent is present, it will also be true that, whenever an action is present, some mental states are present. Thus, by a parallel argument, we ought to conclude that children accept the following Modied Causal Principle: 4. Agents mental states are causal factors in the production of their actions. Agent-causationists maintain that the sort of causation that holds between an agent and an action is fundamentally irreducible to causal relations between mental states of an agent and the action. But if children accept both the Causal Principle and the Modied Causal Principle, what reason do we have to think that the content of the rst will be fundamentally irreducible to the content of the second? Indeed, what reason do we have to think that the two principles are really distinct at all? If the content of the folks implicit conception of the causal power of agents is something reducible to or identical with their conception of the causal power of agents mental states, then there is no reason to think that the folk conception of agency is tied to the philosophical theory of agent-causation. In general, compatibilists should have no problem with the evidence Nichols cites to show that children consider agents to have special causal powers, that they treat agents distinctively (p. 479). As Nichols notes in 2, lots of research on mindreading, including his own (2003), suggests that children come to recognize internal mental states of agents (beliefs, desires, intentions) as causally inuencing agents actions and that people tend not to attribute these mental states and their causal powers to ordinary objects (unless the objects act as if they are goal-directed). To know whether the Causal Principle suggests a conception of agent-causation, we would need to know whether people consider agents to cause actions in virtue of being a special kind of substance rather than in virtue of having special kinds of internal states.5
5

Evidence that children tend to be dualists might help to establish this point, but note that agent-causation still requires that agents as substances cause their actions, not only that those mental states that cause actions are irreducibly non-physical (another way of being a dualist); cf. Bloom (2004).

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Perhaps, however, Nichols has a simpler argument in mind for the claim that the folk conception of free will best ts the theory of agent-causation. Rather than saddling children with (even implicit) conceptions of agents as substance-causes, perhaps the idea is just that children think of human agents as acting in an indeterministic way that is importantly different than the way physical objects behave. As we described it, two features distinguish agent-causal from event-causal libertarianism: rst, that the agent-causal relation holds between a substance and an event, and second, that this relation is fundamentally different than those ordinary causal relations that hold between ordinary physical eventsdifferent in a way that precludes its being reduced to mere physical event-causation. In the previous section we pointed out that Nichols data does not support the claim that childrens conception of free will incorporates the rst feature. However, if it could be shown that childrens conception of free will incorporates at least the second feature, then an argument to the effect that agent-causal accounts best capture childrens conception could be made. The experiments Nichols presents in his 3.2 are designed to provide evidence supporting the claim that agents cause actions in a fundamentally different way than ordinary physical events cause other ordinary physical events. Experiment 1 (pp. 483486), which we will not discuss in any detail, establishes (to our minds, at least) that children conceive of an agents causal powers as being different than an objects causal powers in that an agents ability to do otherwise is not reducible to Humes simple criterion of the agents being free of constraints.6 Nichols Experiment 2 (pp. 486489) is supposed to establish that childrens conception of the ability to do otherwise cannot be captured by any conditional analysis. We argue below that the experiment fails in this aim. However, the experiment might be seen as providing support for the claim that childrens conception of free action differs fundamentally from their conception of ordinary physical causal processes. If this is right, then it would suggests that childrens conception of how agents cause actions is incompatible with a theory that takes those causal relations to be physical relations of event-causation, thus requiring an agent-causal account to accurately capture the conception. In Nichols Experiment 2, participants (nine children around 5 years of age) were presented with several scenarios involving a physical event (e.g. water coming to boil), a non-moral choice (e.g. a girls choosing to have vanilla ice cream), and a moral choice (e.g. a girls choosing to steal a candy bar). After a series of comprehension questions about the conditions leading up to the crucial event,

Again, however, this evidence is entirely consistent with a compatibilist view that says agents ability to do otherwise derives from their ability to act on certain mental states, so long as this ability is interpreted in line with a conditional analysis (see 5 below).
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children are asked whether, if all these prior conditions were the same, the event had to happen. In the moral choice case, for instance, they are asked: Okay, now imagine that all of that was exactly the same and that what Mary wanted was exactly the same. If everything in the world was the same right up until she chose to steal, did Mary have to choose to steal? (p. 487). Nichols found a signicant difference between childrens responses to this question regarding the cases of moral choices and their responses regarding the cases of physical events (he also found such differences in pilot studies with adults; see note 7, p. 488): for instance, children were more likely to say that, given the same prior circumstances, Mary did not have to steal than they were to say that, given the same prior circumstances, the water did not have to boil.7 One conclusion the data appear to support is that childrens conception of human choice is not readily captured by a conditional analysis. We will discuss this in the following section; for the present, however, we will grant the conclusion and assume, along with Nichols, that a response to the effect that Mary did not have to choose to steal is evidence that the respondents conception of choosing is one that requires indeterminism in order to be satised. If this is correct, then the asymmetry between responses in the moral choice and physical event cases may suggest that peoples conception of choosing really is fundamentally different than their conception of physical causation. If choices have to be indeterministic but physical causal processes do not, then we seem to have good evidence that choices are conceived of as fundamentally different than physical processesi.e. we have reason to think that only a description of choice that satises the second, anti-reductive feature of agent-causation can capture the way most people conceive of human choice. There is, however, an alternative explanation for the asymmetrical responses. Perhaps, rather than stemming from a fundamental difference in peoples conceptions of choices and physical processes, the asymmetry stems from a difference in peoples conceptions of certain complex processes and simple processes. People may conceive of human choices as indeterministic not because they are choices, but because they are complex and people conceive of complex processes (including both some human choices and some physical processes) as being indeterministic, even though they conceive of certain simple processes as deterministic. If people think that indeterminism occurs in some causal processes, that does not suggest that they think it occurs in all causal processes. They may think some simple processes, such as water boiling, are deterministic in that certain conditions (e.g. the waters reaching the right temperature) always produce the

As Nichols notes, these results are tentative (in part because they use a small sample size). Indeed, even these results are rather mixed: about half the responses were that the water did not have to boil, and some participants responded that the agent did have to choose as she did.

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same outcome (e.g. the waters boiling). But more complex processes, such as human decision-makingbut also perhaps complex physical processes such as those involved in weathermay be considered indeterministic in a way that allows the same conditions to produce different outcomes. Alternatively, it may be more difcult for people to properly imagine in the case of such complex processes all of the conditions that would have to be identical so as to produce the exact same outcome, in which case participants may fail to reason counterfactually from an acceptance of the stipulated condition. That is, despite what the scenario says, they may be sensitive to the fact that just one tiny little difference in the initial conditions of a complex process can produce different outcomes and this may lead them to respond that the outcome did not have to occur. Either of the above explanations might even explain why some of the participants in Nichols study did not respond that the water had to boil. We developed an experiment to further test Nichols claim that people are signicantly more likely to be indeterminists about human choices than about physical events, but we used a more complex physical event (lightning striking). We also used a roll-back paradigm that is different than the one Nichols employed.8 And our participants were not children but 99 introductory philosophy students at Florida State University. Each participant read three scenarios (counterbalanced for order) and answered one question about each (circling either Yes, No, or I dont know). They had an opportunity to explain their answers on the back of the survey. Scenario L: Imagine that a lightning bolt hits a particular tree at a particular time. Now imagine that the universe is re-created over and over again, starting from the exact same initial conditions (and with all the same laws of nature). If that were the case, do you think that every time the universe is re-created everything would happen the exact same way, including the lightning bolts hitting the tree at that time? Scenario I: Imagine a woman is trying to decide between ordering vanilla ice cream and chocolate ice cream, and at a particular time she decides on vanilla. Now imagine that the universe is re-created over and over again, starting from the exact same initial conditions (and with all the same laws of nature). If that were the case, do you think that every time the universe is re-created everything would happen the exact same way, including the womans deciding to order vanilla at that time? Scenario S: Imagine a woman is trying to decide whether or not to steal a necklace, and at a particular time she decides to steal it. Now imagine that the universe is re-created over and over again, starting from the exact same initial conditions

We broke company with Nichols methodology in part because we have concerns about how participants will understand questions involving practical modalities like had to; see 5 below.
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J. Turner and E. Nahmias (and with all the same laws of nature). If that were the case, do you think that every time the universe is re-created everything would happen the exact same way, including the womans deciding to steal the necklace at that time?

Results seem to suggest conicting beliefs among our participants about whether the events would happen every time, though consistently across the three scenarios over half the participants responded that the events would not happen every time the universe was re-created.9

Yes Lightning (L) Ice Cream (I) Steal necklace (S) 42 36 36

No 49 52 55

I dont know 8 11 8

Of the 99 participants, 30 were determinists who answered yes to all three scenarios, 40 were indeterminists who answered no to all three, and 29 were complex cases who offered different responses to the scenarios. Most of the determinists offered explanations suggesting that they believed that the same conditions and laws must produce the same outcome, and that this is true of human choices too (e.g. Certain things happen as a result of what happened before it. If the situations were recreated exactly, then there would be no other choice but for [the] occurrence to happen).10 Of the 40 indeterminists, about half offered explanations that suggested there is some randomness or chaos in the universe, without suggesting any difference between decision-making and natural processes (e.g. In a universe where things happen randomly all the time why, if reversed, would those same random things happen the exact same way?). Of the remaining indeterminists and the complex cases, about 20 participants made reference to something specic regarding human activity, with 13 suggesting that humans have choice or free will so that they can produce different outcomes (e.g. Humans may be able to change their thinking and their ways. The lightning strike doesnt t into this because it was inevitable). But, overall, only 9 of 99 participants responded that the human choices would not happen the same way every time but that the lightning bolt would. Hence, our results did not replicate the Nichols nding that there is a signicant difference in participants responses regarding the inevitability of physical events and of human choices.
9 10

Since there happened to be 99 participants, the absolute numbers in the table can also be treated as percentages. No order effects were found. These determinists did not, however, suggest that they thought the choices were thereby not free. As we have found in other studies, most ordinary people are not adverse to compatibilist thinking (see Nahmias et al., 2005).

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We take our results to be unhelpful in sorting out peoples conception of the ability to do otherwise (in part, for reasons we explain in the next section). But our results suggest that most people do not believe that all physical processes are deterministic while human choices are indeterministic, even if they might believe that certain simple physical events are deterministic (for that matter, people might believe that, if a person has an overwhelming desire to A and a belief that they should A, that will deterministically cause a choice to A). Rather, people seem to have varying views about whether or not the world works deterministically, including both its complex physical processes and human decision-making. Our results suggest an alternative explanation of the divergence Nichols found in childrens responses to physical processes and human choices. Though further testing is required, it may be that children see signicant differences between different types of physical processes (e.g. simple vs. complex) and signicant similarities (regarding the likelihood of occurring otherwise given the same conditions) between certain complex physical processes and human choices.

5. Could Have Done Otherwise? Our results, then, do not bear out the asymmetry required to establish that people think of actions as fundamentally different than physical processes. Of course, since we did not perform the experiment with young children, we cannot claim that their responses would be similar to our adult participants responses. Nonetheless, we think it is fair to say that much more needs to be done if we are to establish that ordinary people (children or adults) conceive of action in a way that accords best with agent-causation. Up until now we have discussed only those parts of Nichols arguments that attempt to establish that people have a conception of agency that satises the Causal Principle. However, even if Nichols cannot show that people have an agent-causal conception of agency, if he can show that people have a particular conception of could have done otherwise (condition 2 on agent-causation), then he may at least conclude that they have a conception of agency that is libertarian. For it is constitutive of the libertarian viewpoint that agents could have done otherwise in the non-conditional sense described in 1.11 Nichols experiment probing childrens responses to different scenarios, discussed above, is supposed to show that children have just such a conception. The idea, we take it, is that a negative answer to the crucial question (i.e. no to the question Did Mary have to choose to steal?) is supposed to indicate that the participants conception of the ability to do otherwise fails to t with a conditional analysis, in
11

Some event-causal libertarians require only indeterminism at an appropriate place in the event-causal chain of mental states causing actions (see Kane, 1996), so they do require this conception of could have done otherwise, though they reject the need for the substancecausation of agent-causation.
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which case the agent could count as being able to do otherwise only if her action was undetermined. For the purposes of the prior section, we granted this conclusion. Now, however, we raise a concern about the relationship between this conclusion and the data advanced to support it. Lets focus on the moral choice case. Childrens responses that Mary did not have to choose to steal are supposed to show that their conception of the ability to do otherwise cannot be captured by any conditional analysis. We suspect the reasoning behind this thought is as follows: According to a conditional analysis, Mary could have chosen otherwise only if she would have chosen otherwise given different initial conditions. Therefore, when people say she still could have done otherwise when were holding the initial conditions xed, they must not be saying that her ability to do otherwise requires different initial conditions. This reasoning is awed: a negative answer to the question need not indicate that a participants conception of the ability to do otherwise is non-conditional. To see why, consider a compatibilist who understands the ability to do otherwise in a conditional way. When presented with the moral choice scenario, he might respond: Even if everything was exactly the same up until the moment Mary chose to steal the candy bar, it is still true that, had something been different, she would not have stolen the candy bar. Ergo, she could have avoided stealing the candy baror, in other words, she did not have to choose to steal the candy bar. That is, Mary did not have to choose to steal because it is not stipulated that the prior conditions themselves had to be as they were. Since those conditions could have been otherwise, Mary could have chosen otherwise. (Compare: I could win the lottery might plausibly be understood as I would win the lottery if and only if my number were picked. My number was not picked, so I did not win the lottery. But that does not entail that I could not have won the lottery or that I had to lose.)12 Of course, a proponent of the conditional analysis will not say that children (or even most adults) have such complex thought processes lying behind their use of practical modal terms. The view is merely that these counterfactuals give the truth conditions of ordinary peoples usages of could have done otherwise and similar locutions. If the truth conditions of these modal terms are opaque to ordinary people, we should not be surprised; after all, few (if any) people can give informative truth conditions for most of their modal locutions. The point can be put another way. There is a practical modality embedded in the crucial question: the participants are asked whether Mary had to choose to

12

It is important, of course, to distinguish the trivial claim that, in deterministic universes, nothing could have been different if the past and laws were not different, from the downright false claim that, in deterministic universes, everything had to happen as it did. Simply saying that a universe is deterministic says nothing about whether its initial conditions or laws had to be as they were.

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steal. And, as modal operators often do, this one gives rise to a scope ambiguity: does the holding xed of the initial conditions fall under the scope of the operator or not? This ambiguity gives rise to two different readings of a negative response to the question of whether she had to choose to steal: A1. A2. Given that everything was exactly the same up until the moment of choice: Mary had to choose to steal. Mary had to: choose to steal given that everything was exactly the same up until the moment of choice.

Now, advocates of conditional analyses do have to say that A2 is true, because there the holding-xed of conditions falls within the scope of the practical modal operator. (A2 roughly says that Mary could not have done the following: chosen not to steal without anything in the past being different.) However, since the holding-xed of conditions in A1 happens before the practical modal operator, the truth-value of what falls within that operator can still depend on counterfactual suppositions about the past (or laws of nature) being different. A1, according to the conditional analysis, should be understood as follows: given that the initial conditions are just as they were, if some relevant condition had been different, Mary would not have chosen to steal. Here the holding xed of conditions is vacuous; A1 is equivalent to If some relevant condition had been different, then Mary would not have chosen to steal. We admit that either interpretation of the question (had to having wide or narrow scope) is consistent with the actual wording in the experiment (and in many ordinary uses of such modal sentences). But we suspect that children (and adults) are more likely to parse the experimental question in a way consistent with A1 rather than A2 thanks to the surface structure of the question. Had to occurs embedded in a clause preceded by a clause that, in effect, tells us to hold conditions xed. That is, the question (simplied) reads: If everything were the same up until her choice, did Mary have to choose to steal? rather than: Did Mary have to choose to steal given that everything up until she chose was the same?. Do the divergent results between responses to those cases involving human choices (especially moral choices) and those involving physical processes (e.g. water boiling), emphasized by Nichols, suggest that childrens conceptions best t a non-conditional analysis of the ability to do otherwise? Perhaps Nichols has in mind an argument like this: If children were employing a conditional analysis in the moral choice cases, then they would also do so in the physical event cases, but then their responses to the two cases should be the same. Since they werent, it is more likely that they were employing a non-conditional sense of the ability to do otherwise in both cases and that they believe agents have this ability whereas physical events do not. The divergence, however, may best be accounted for in some other way. Perhaps the conception of the ability to do otherwise is conditional, but the divergence in responses involves sensitivity of the conditional to factors other than
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indeterminism. According to the conditional analysis, S could have done otherwise than A if and only if, had something been different, S would not have A-ed. But no fan of the conditional analysis thinks that the something ranges over every possible change in initial conditionsafter all, for any action A and agent S, its true that if S hadnt existed, S would not have A-ed, but this shouldnt be taken as evidence that every agent could have done otherwise than A even by a fan of the conditional analysis. This alternative interpretation of Nichols results suggests that the conditional analysis is correct but that the sorts of variations in initial conditions allowed in the antecedent of the counterfactual are of a sort that will only make a difference to very complex processes. If this is correct, then the asymmetry in childrens responses to the different cases would reect only the sensitivity of the described processes to minute changes in initial conditions (and childrens recognition, however tacit, of this sensitivity). As we have seen in 4, there is good reason to think that peoples judgments in these sorts of cases is correlated with their complexity, which is in turn correlated with sensitivity to small variations in initial conditions. Thus, there is some reason to think that, for all Experiment 2 has shown, childrens conception of the ability to do otherwise might yield to a conditional analysis and be compatible with determinism after all.

6. Further Research and Conclusions Like Nichols, we take our conclusions to be tentative, in need of further testing with different scenarios and more participants. However, coming up with a way to test whether people have a conditional or an unconditional conception of the ability to do otherwise will be extremely difcult, given the complex issues we raised above regarding practical modal operators and their scope. (Its no coincidence that modal claims are notoriously difcult even for philosophers to sort out.) However, we share Nichols hope that empirical tests of ordinary peoples intuitions and concept use will, at a minimum, help to clarify which philosophical theories are actually commonsensical or intuitive. As it stands, philosophers tend to take their own intuitions to represent those of ordinary folk. But since philosophers intuitions often conict, especially in the free will debate, and since their intuitions are likely to be inuenced by their theoretical commitments, Nichols methodology of experimentally testing pretheoretical folk is appropriate (and children will be even more pretheoretical than adults!). Finally, we should add that Nichols various explanations for childrens development of the belief in agent-causation, including his favored explanation that it derives from their beliefs about moral obligation, raise very interesting questions. These questions, we think, remain largely intact even if it turns out that children do not acquire a belief in anything as intricate as agent-causation. That is, even if children have a conception of free agency that looks more like certain compatibilist theories, the question remains how that conception develops and
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whether prior beliefs and practices regarding moral obligation inuence it. We conclude as we began, by praising the methodological approach Nichols advocates and by agreeing that the questions he raises are certainly (some of) the right ones to be asking. Department of Philosophy Rutgers University Department of Philosophy, Brains & Behavior Program Georgia State University

References
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