Freedom and Responsibility

Judgments about freedom and moral responsibility have been argued to be essential to how we view ourselves and others. Being free and morally responsible (or at least a belief to that effect) has been argued to underwrite elements of human existence ranging from one’s sense of self-worth to having genuine, loving relationships. One extensively explored question in the philosophical literature about freedom and moral responsibility is: can you be free and morally responsible if all your actions are determined? There is substantial philosophical disagreement about the right answer to that question. Those who answer “yes” are called compatibilists and those who answer “no” are called incompatibilists. This chapter documents extensive evidence using representative and diverse materials and methods indicating that the global personality trait extraversion predicts those who tend to be compatibilists. These relations have also been observed to exist in diverse cultures and languages (e.g., those who speak English, Spanish, or German in North America and Europe). The evidence presented in this chapter represents the paradigmatic example in our book of personality predicting philosophically relevant judgments.