Defending Pantheism

[Alan V]

The only conundrums that spinoza could legitimately be said to have directly addressed, were those ethical and factual issues arising from the various superstitions prevalent in his own time, effectively abandoned today. 

He made a pretty good case for hard determinism/lack of free will with his metaphysics, too. And this has far reaching implications in ethics, criminal justice, and a great many other things. Since reality can be described as one substance acting upon itself (according to the laws of nature governing such actions) there is no room for free will in Spinoza's metaphysics. Realizing this, he concludes that free will is illusory. 

So experience itself, no less clearly than reason, teaches that men think they are free because they are conscious of their own actions and ignorant of the causes that make them act as they do, and that the decisions of the mind are nothing but the appetites themselves, so they vary as the disposition of the body varies.

https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/...za1665.pdf

The bolded portion of the quote shows how his mind/body metaphysics relate to free will.

And what happens when creatures are as complex as humans, with multiple and often conflicting desires?  Reasoning happens, to sort them out, prioritize them, and keep them in their appropriate places.  We have both desires and inhibitions for this reason.  To try to reduce this question to such a simple equation is inappropriate for a philosopher.

Reasons are abstractions.  We act by reasons as well as by causes, depending on the situations.  Reasons are not the same as physical causes.  They don't reduce.  You have to discuss emergent properties at their own level of complexity.  Thus the concept of free will.