I don't think we have to decide what exactly the nature of the self is to say that we could do other than what we do.
The self is central to the idea of agency that isn't merely a function of natural laws and processes, so I think it's crucial to the question of free will.
And I would dispute that contention. I would argue that we can understand ourselves as biological creatures contained by nature/physics in a variety of ways, but that within that sandbox we have genuine choices, ie decisions we can make between more than one viable action.
Which goes back to my earlier point: who is (ostensibly) making the decisions?
There is a third way aside from randomness and determinism: choice. The choices we make as moral agents have causal power in shaping who we are.
The "choices" would themselves be part of a causal chain, though, and that still doesn't resolve
why or
how we arrive at them to begin with. A crocodile would die if it ate poison, but it didn't make a "choice." It just took a specific action that was part of the causal chain in its life and ended up killing it.
Yet that doesn't universally work. At times unintentional killing is also indicative of a future pattern of harmful behavior. Yet I'm willing to bet you'd still want the intentional murderer to serve a more severe sentence than the reckless driver, even if they only ever kill the same number of people.
The probability that a reckless driver will go on to become a serial killer is much lower than the probability that a murderer will become one. Sometimes being a bully at school also indicates future criminal behavior (up to and including murder), but meting out equal punishments for bullying and murder based on that possibility would be extremely flawed.
I would actually argue that the success of rehabilitative prison systems of countries like Norway and Finland demonstrates that focusing on the concept of "moral accountability" per se has little benefit in a strictly legal and rehabilitative context. The central issue is how to address the causes and effects of the crimes, not which moral label to assign to them or which punishment to choose based on that assignment.
Perhaps this may be helpful to you: agency is part of our nature as well. Something being "our nature" does not necessarily mean we exercise no control over it.
I would cite my points about the self that I explained above as a response to this.
It's certainly true that we don't have control over a lot of what we think and feel, especially in the moment. Yet we also know that choices we make actually do impact, in a more indirect, long-term way, how we think and feel. This is the basis, for example, of quite a few interventions to improve various mental health symptoms like depression or anxiety. We are not just helpless slaves of our feelings. We have the power to shape our minds. Not unlimited power, but some.
What makes us seek those interventions in the first place, and do we control whether or not they work for our specific situation? And of course, the same question comes up every time a scenario involving a supposed choice is at hand: who exactly is doing the "choosing"?
I'm not saying we're slaves of our feelings; I'm saying that the things that can make us not become slaves to them are still not indicative of agency as you defined it here:
First, let's dispense with "free will" as the label here. I prefer agency. We have agency, ie the ability to make choices. Choices are decisions we have the ability to make between multiple options.
I practice meditation, mindfulness, and a few other techniques for emotional regulation. You can also see in other debate threads that I don't snap at other posters and violate the rules while debating them. Does that mean all of these things are an indication of agency? I don't believe so: their existence and my using them don't say anything about agency or lack thereof. Our biology and psychology are bound by natural laws, and sometimes understanding how some of these laws work can significantly help us to improve quality of life.
Much of the treatment plan around addressing John's anger is going to revolve around John making different choices when feelings of anger arise. These choices develop, over time, into habits that can literally make John less prone to anger.
Is John separate from an expression of biological and natural processes? Is his self not a product of these things and therefore bound and shaped by them? What made John seek treatment, if not thoughts that occurred in his brain? Would he have sought help if he hadn't been aware it existed to begin with?
I think one of the reasons the idea of agency can be quite intuitive is that, as I said earlier, we don't have a frame of reference for higher intelligence or what a species with "more agency" would look like. If the hypothetical super-intelligent aliens I proposed earlier met us, perhaps they would regard us just as we regard crocodiles and believe that we had no agency either.
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