Folk Philosophy beliefs on free will and responsibility: some findings from the experience of teaching Bioethics in Biomedical Engineering

Abstract

In one of the foundational experiments of experimental philosophy, Nichols and Knobe argued that people tend to regard a nondeterministic universe as a condition of moral responsibility. They add that this intuition varies dramatically if the question is posed based on a concrete case that triggers an emotional response of rejection, in which case most people are inclined to appreciate moral responsibility even in a deterministic universe. Applied to bioethics students in biomedical engineering, the results are completely different, consistently across cohorts. This article explores different hypotheses (methodology, cultural context, mother tongue, and educational and vocational background) that could explain the divergence.