[ravenide]

If I’m understanding you correctly, for purposes of free will and moral responsibility, the details underlying the ‘control’ people have don’t matter—all that matters is that they change their behavior in response to feedback that what they did was wrong. In order to give that feedback, we need to take for granted the ‘they did’ part of the sentence. Is that a fair summary?

If so, I think I agree. But it makes me feel like we’re talking about different things. I think we may just have a namespace collision over the phrase “free will” (which I think is part of your whole point).

I guess my question is, if your main concern is being able to assign moral blame, defined as saying someone did something and that thing was right or wrong, why does that require free will? Without it you can still say people do things (in the car sense) and make value judgments about them. Why define free will this way, instead of in the straightforward sense of choice?

[naasking]

> In order to give that feedback, we need to take for granted the ‘they did’ part of the sentence. Is that a fair summary?

"They deliberately did/felt justified doing", but yes that's essentially it, modulo the considerations I discuss below.

> I think we may just have a namespace collision over the phrase “free will” (which I think is part of your whole point).

This is part of what makes the debate so frustrating and confusing for many, because we have religious "free will" with souls and whatnot, we have philosophical "free will" for ethics and moral responsibility, we have scientific "free will" for experimenters (free will theorem), and all of them overlap in some ways, but not in all ways, which leads to considerable confusion.

Incompatibilists think "free will" in all of the above contexts mean exactly the same thing, ie. theistic free will and experimental free will and philosophical free will all mean some sort of freedom from antecedent causes, and that this is necessary for moral responsibility. This is why you'll see scientists and science fans claim we don't have free will, because the nuance between the above contexts is lost.

> Without free will you can still say people did things (in the car sense) and make value judgments about them. Why define free will this way, instead of in the straightforward sense of choice?

Because not every choice is freely made, or an expression of their will. Some people are coerced into making choices, some people have cognitive impairments and so are not capable of making free or willed choices (insanity, dementia, etc.), some people are not of sufficient age for them to understand the choice they're making, and so on. How do we package up all these considerations into a term of art that describes when a person of sound mind and body makes choice freely? Free will.

Compatibilism emerged from the notion of free will in law. Consider all the conditions for legal culpability, and I think you'll begin to see how nuanced this is, and how these considerations are deeply entrenched in how people approach moral reasoning.