[naasking]

> He is responsible for stealing the car in both situations.

He's causally responsible yes, free will is about assigning moral responsibility. The validity of various reasons for acting immorally is precisely the question that free will addresses.

[ajuc]

> free will is about assigning moral responsibility

Moral responsibility seems to me to be the same as the casual responsibility in these cases?

There's the famous "goal does/does not justify means" - if blackmail removed your moral responsibility then it's meaningless because there's nothing to justify. I don't think it's the case.

I think moral responsibility is still there, it's just negligible compared to the alternatives.

And I still don't see how it requires free will (except for the useless definition "anything that learns and can make a choice" - then by definition we have a free will, but that was never in question, why even waste a word on such a concept?).

[dragonwriter]

> He's causally responsible yes

On one case, only as inevitable intermediary in the chain of causation, in the other as a necessary part of the ultimate, uncaused causation.

These are very different senses of “causally responsible”.

> free will is about assigning moral responsibility.

Only indirectly, in the context of it being assumed axiomatically that having ones will be a necessary uncaused cause of the outcome is required for moral responsibility; it's directly about assigning root cause.

[naasking]

> These are very different senses of “causally responsible”.

The posters I'm engaging here don't believe in uncaused causation (nor do I), so there's little difference in the causal character of the thief's actions here in either case.

[dragonwriter]

> The posters I'm engaging here don't believe in uncaused causation

Free will is, by definition, both uncaused and a cause of other actions. If you don't believe in uncaused causation, you don't believe in free will, but you can't discuss the meaning and implication of free will in any meaningful way while ignoring the entirety of it's definition whether or not you believe in free will (or the broader conceptual class of uncaused causes of which free will is a part.)

[naasking]

> Free will is, by definition, both uncaused and a cause of other actions.

No it's not. The free will debate is about defining what free will actually means so that we can assign moral responsibility.

The scientific meaning of "free will" as experimenters being able to setup their instruments free from influence of that which they're measuring is not what's being discussed here.