All of Asking Questions's Comments + Replies

I know, but that has problems of its own: there isn't much practical difference between imprisonment-for -consequentialist- reasons and imprisonment-for-moralistic reasons, so there's not much basis for a crusade.

So the usual question for LW is "How to make good decisions?", with many variations of what "good" or "decisions" might mean. These are not necessarily good actions, it could turn out that a bad action results from following a good policy, and the decision was about the policy. In that context, asking if something is "free will" or "moral responsibility" is not obviously informative. Trying to find a clearer meaning for such terms is still a fine task, but it needs some motivation that makes assignment of such meaning not too arbitrary. I think "free will" does OK as simply a reference to decision making considerations, to decision making algorithms and immediately surrounding theory that gives them meaning, but that's hardly standard. Moral responsibility is harder to place, perhaps it's a measure of how well an instance of an agent channels their idealized decision algorithm? Then things like brain damage disrupt moral responsibility by making the physical body follow something other than the intended decision algorithm, thus making that algorithm not responsible for what the body does, not being under the algorithm's control.