Why free will probably does not exist, and why we should stop treating people -

[WisdomOfTheTrees]

OP: My take, free will exists on a sliding scale and the amount is contingent upon set and setting.

Unless you believe in god, then you and your free will are just screwed.

Edit: BTW, I'm a bowel of petunias.

I really don't like fatalistic statements, such as "who cares, we're all going to die anyways". It's the most sophomoric thing, I actually feel stress when I hear people making banal existential statements. But no, I don't understand what you mean by free will being a sliding scale, dependent on the "set and setting". If you mean that perhaps some people are more conscious than others, then there may be some biological grounds for you to make that argument (if not entirely conjectural). Because if you look at the development of the human brain, there's different parts of the human brain; the most recent of which is the cerebral cortex, responsible for all the fancy shmancy stuff that we humans can do that monkeys can't. So, in a way you might say that we're more highly conscious than a monkey, because we can recognize ourselves in a mirror and have a concept of our own death. 

I'm quite certain that has nothing to do with determinism though, because the idea that we're all bound by the laws of nature and aren't behaving independently of them, isn't contradicted by the fact that someone can be more or less conscious. It is all one in the same.