This is a common theme of your reasoning. You think "natural laws and processes" = determinism. But that's precisely what needs to be proved here. What if agency is a natural law or process?
I'm not a determinist because, as far as I know, quantum mechanics demonstrates that there's a lot of randomness in the universe. However, that doesn't mean we control this randomness, as I previously mentioned.
As for agency, in order for it to be a consistent concept, we would have to define what the agent is in the first place.
Who is doing the choosing? That's the question I've brought up multiple times in this discussion, because I think it's at the core of the whole subject. If our experience of a conscious, "choosing" self is merely a product of biology and natural laws, I don't see how it is "free." It is just an expression and continuation of natural processes.
For agency to be a natural law or process, the notion of an agent first has to be coherently defined. I don't think it is, mainly for the above reasons.
As I explained previously, we change ourselves. So yes, choices do have causal power - but we still choose them.
The actions we take can change us, but this doesn't address why or how we took said actions. If a tribe in the Amazon went to Harvard and studied physics, they would all be physicists. But they won't take that action; they don't want to move to a city in the first place. There are many actions that can change our lives, but whether or not we take a specific action at a specific time is, in my opinion, not a product of agency or free will.
Being a serial killer is not the only way to kill multiple people. Being a reckless driver can be part of a larger pattern of reckless behavior that can endanger others. But again, I'm betting you want the reckless driver to have a lesser punishment than the murderer, even if they only ever end up killing the same number of people in their lives. So again, something is afoot here beyond raw harm assessment. Intention is morally relevant.
As long as the reckless driver failed to rehabilitate, I would want them to remain in rehabilitation. They could remain there for a year or 50, and the same goes for the murderer. No murderer should be released from rehabilitation before qualified professionals deem them no longer a threat to society.
On average, murderers need to remain in rehab for much longer than reckless drivers because the former tend to have issues that are far more complicated and harder to address than the latter. I'm not talking about punishment; I'm talking about reform and rehab. Punishment seems to imply retribution as the basis, but I don't think that's a sound basis for a legal system—and punitive legal systems tend to have higher recidivism rates than rehabilitative ones (e.g., Norway's and Finland's).
Rehabilitation can be effective, but you're still going to run into moral accountability there: part of the process of rehabilitation is convincing the criminal that they are morally accountable for their behavior and should therefore change it because they see their choices are harming others, which is wrong.
This goes back to my point that phrasing things in such terms tends to be practically useful, even if the concepts themselves may not withstand deep scrutiny (in my opinion). When I meditate, I also feel a lot of peace of mind because I believe that an action I can take is helping me. This doesn't mean that action is a result of free agency, but strictly in terms of my capacity to be able to do something, it is something I can (and do) practice in order to improve my quality of life.
If someone else believes that the action they can take is also one that they are
freely choosing, then more power to them. I just don't believe it is, for the reasons I've already expanded on in this thread.
Again, you'd have to make the case on determinism that 100% of our action is dictated by forces beyond our control, and that it has nothing to do with our choice to engage in the intervention.
This is a complex part to get into because it touches on two different things. First, we would need to clarify exactly what we mean by "we": the same point about the concept of self applies. If our subjective experience of self is a product of biology and natural law, then saying "we do X or Y" is equivalent to saying "biology and natural law have done X or Y." The only difference is that, in this case, biology and natural law result in a conscious actor rather than an unconscious one (like a rock or a leaf).
Second, as a continuation of the above point, our "choice" to engage in the intervention is then an expression of multiple factors that have nothing to do with free agency but rather an accumulation of factors and processes that we indeed don't determine or control, even if it feels like we do. For example, neither of us can just "choose" to believe that therapy is a pseudoscience or that homeopathy is impeccably effective. This belief, which we can't choose, plays a part in our opting for therapy, and so do many other beliefs and thoughts that we don't choose either.
Parenthetically, I'll emphasize that the word "determinism" doesn't describe my position because, in most common usage I've seen, it tends to imply a complete lack of randomness. I believe there's randomness in the universe, however, so I'm not a determinist in that sense. Actually, I don't even think whether or not the universe has randomness has any bearing on the question of agency or lack thereof; we still don't control these natural processes either way.
It sounds like you are saying we're slaves of our feelings, though. Perhaps one feeling takes over another, but eventually we just inexorably, uncontrollably do whatever our strongest whim tells us we must do. Slavery by any other name...
No, we may discard even our strongest whims due to our mental constitution and techniques we learn throughout our lives, so that's not my point. However, the combination of our mental constitution and the techniques or knowledge that allows us to regulate emotions and thoughts in specific ways is still bound by the arguments I've elaborated on before. It
feels as though I'm "choosing" to practice emotional regulation and various mental techniques, but I'm practicing them because an accumulation of factors has added up to this point.
My action of learning and practicing such techniques is primarily a result of my belief in the effectiveness of therapy, my desire to improve my quality of life, and my drive to navigate thoughts and emotions in a healthy manner. But could I "choose" to believe that therapy is ineffective or to simply drop my desire to improve my quality of life? Could I choose to desire a mentally unhealthy life instead? If not, then the action I took was a result of factors that, again, are ultimately not down to free choice.
Furthermore, we're still left with the issue of defining who or what the agent is and whether said agent is truly "free." It could feel like I'm choosing every single thing in my life, but that's a subjective feeling and experience that doesn't necessarily reflect the actual functioning of natural laws and processes.
See above. "Natural laws" =/= determinism.
I've responded to the point about determinism above.
Agency doesn't require omniscience.
No, but if our actions are decided by our knowledge, experiences, and beliefs, then a lot of our actions are merely a function of things that ultimately come down to a lot of phenomena and processes well beyond our control. Religious beliefs are a prime example of this: they can permeate almost every single aspect of a person's life, yet that person can't simply "choose" to stop believing. They would have to be convinced to believe or not, but we don't "choose" what we find convincing either. Could you convince yourself that the Earth was flat even if you tried? Or that Jesus was coming back to redeem all believers and leave non-believers behind?
And their ignorant assessment of us would be just as flawed as the determinist's is.
You've said earlier that you agree that more intelligence could theoretically confer a higher degree of agency, so I'm not sure why their assessment would be ignorant. The difference between our intelligence and theirs could hypothetically be as big as the difference between our intelligence and a crocodile's, which could entail a correspondingly big difference in agency.
