It seems that the subject of free will is completely bound up in the subject of moral responsibility (especially historically), and often more narrowly bound up with the concept of *good-evil* dualism. While it may have been a useful tool, in ancient times for developing ideas like a criminal justice system, today it seems to me that more sophisticated frames for *generative ethics* exist.
Historically, there have also been questions connecting free will to *indeterminism* and Aristotle's *prime mover*. Investigations here seem misaligned for investigating questions of moral responsibility. It really does not matter whether there is some phase space with cusps, singularities, or any other symmetrically breakable property. This seems to be where *sciencey* discussions move to speak about things below the Planck scale or something else equally stultifying and decidedly less useful. Why do we want to import the technology of free will, and to what application do we find it useful? Like god, free will is a strikingly unnecessary idea that is arguably responsible for the punish-reward perspective that many of us use to naively understand ideas of justice. A criminal justice system designed around free will constrains interpretation to focus on who does good or who does evil, in other frames we may not care whether or not Charles Manson is evil, but rather whether or not we want him running about with whatever agency the rest of us enjoy.
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