Do we have free will?

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We have free will, but that also must be balanced with responsibility. There are consequences to making bad decisions....... However, most peoples' "freedom" is a myth, ideologically and intellectually. Because their opinions are marketed to them (propaganda), usually in a package deal with other opinions, which also goes against the notion of free will. They pay taxes on everything they think they own, where do those taxes go? Who collects them?
So really, to be free is to seek out the facts, to be free from the constraints of ideology and conformity and to look for plain truth.... Not to cling to anything, or anyone, but to be able to analyze everything. There is only one ultimate external reality.
Most people can't do that though, it's few who can apparently.... Because to be free one truely must be free from themselves, from their own ego. Ego can make people easier to manipulate into making bad decisions and falling into mindless group think.

But there is a good side to humanity too, that part of humanity which gives people compassion, secular universal ideas of right and wrong, for instance murder is universally understood to be wrong, rape is understood to be wrong.... Most people for example, would wish for world peace, or an end to hunger, these are pretty much universal aspirations of mankind.

So I don't think humankind was made to be robotic either...... Damn this is getting difficult to explain.

Well, right, the issue is then defining free will as not having a relationship with causality.

Well, the issue with a compatibilist is whether or not you are forced by a person to make a decision. I don't think that any determinist would deny that you are effectively an agent in your own fate, this could be shown with you having a set of constants pre-loaded when making decisions that affect the equations in a manner such that the choice is effectively yours. Now, if you act negatively, that choice is a result of your nature, and if you act positively that choice is also a result of your nature. The issue is that many take determinism to reduce away the nature of an individual as an agent because they try to refer to these far-off causes instead of looking at the efficient cause which is the self. You are yourself, an acting agent with a psychology and all sorts of other things. I feel like I am not explaining the position *that* well, but basically compatibilism places choices in a deterministic framework by saying that we make choices based upon who we are, not upon some mysterious acausal element.

I don’t think behavioral determinism makes personal responsibility or justice irrelevant. All it does is force us to see these principles as functional social constructs rather than disembodied transcendental truths. Unfortunately people are afraid to do this. There is some good discussion of this in the book “The Blank Slate” by Steven Pinker.

Haven't read Pinker, but agree totally re: responsibility etc. What I don't understand is why people are afraid to see them as social constructs.

I wonder what all this talk about responsibility is all about. If a person functions badly in society something obviously must be fixed, however the guilty individual feels. If a machine part functions badly in a machine nobody demands the part has to feel responsible or guilty. You just fix the part or take it out of the machine and replace it. Society is a functioning machine and should be treated rationally.

Quite. The whole issue of punishment is mysterious, to me anyway, ( perhaps it's an AS thing).

Justice is so clearly a socially constructed thing varying from place to place and time to time, what could free will have to do with it even if it existed? Ah, but just thought! That is why free will is "needed" for "justice"; to disguise/camouflage the "time and place dependent nature" of the process called justice, to make it seem universal/timeless.

No.

I do think it's more complex than that since you're dealing with humans in society, not machines (or so i'd like to think sometimes).

No doubt it is complex which is an inherent part of the problem. How do you fix a murderer or a thief? Is pure punishment a sufficient remedy? It probably does work for a percentage of people but the much larger percentage of convicted people who are released and quickly return to prison should indicate some basic thought is required to examine why there is such a huge and expensive prison population in the USA. I doubt it matters whether a person feels responsible for a violation of accepted behavior if that responsibility does not result in a change of behavior which permits better functioning in society. Undoubtedly the machine comparison is simplistic but it boils the problem down to basics and if the basics are fulfilled the problem may be solvable.