No bypassing!
As I noted earlier, incompatibilists say that determinism rules out free will and moral responsibility. They often defend their position by claiming that common sense endorses it. In recent years, the philosopher Eddy Nahmias and his co-researchers have tested that claim and found it to be disconfirmed by the evidence. Nahmias writes:
Our studies suggest that most people do not take determinism, properly understood, to be incompatible with free will and moral responsibility. Rather, most people take determinism to be threatening when they misinterpret it to entail reductionism, epiphenomenalism, or fatalism ‒ what I call “bypassing threats” to agency.
Unfortunately, despite the fact that determinism is easy to define, its implications are widely misunderstood. Thus, many people wrongly take determinism to imply that the conditions necessitating your choice somehow bypass your mental states ‒ your beliefs, desires, and deliberations ‒ when in fact the necessitating conditions must include your mental states. The infinitely old chain of necessitation that culminates in your choice doesn’t bypass you; it goes through you.
Compatibilism, the view I accept, says that free will and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism. It doesn’t say that free will and moral responsibility are compatible with what many people mistakenly think is determinism.
