The presumption of compatibilism

Abstract Recent debates over the relationship between omniscience and free will have generated a number of views (e.g. Ockhamism). Though fascinating in their own right, what interests us in this paper is not so much the views themselves, but the way that intuitions have figured prominently in justifying these views. Proponents of the various views assume that their intuitions are the most pre-philosophically natural (or closely aligned with common sense) and therefore best situated to serve as justifications for their views. These implicit claims, however, are not a priori justified; they require empirical investigation. To take a modest step forward in exploring pre-philosophical intuitions about the relationship between omniscience and free will we conducted a series of experiments which presented participants with three cases (two are prominent in the free will and philosophy of religion literatures: Newcomb’s Paradox (Nozick 1969) and Plantinga’s ‘ant colony’ (1986)). Experiment 1 sampled US participants from varied religious backgrounds. Experiment 2 used English-language vignettes and sampled non-Christian persons from India. Experiment 3 used Korean-language translations, and sampled two groups of South Koreans, Christians and non-Christians. Analysis of the data revealed that pre-philosophical intuitions about omniscience and free will are describable as compatibilist.