Is Moral Responsibility Compatible With Determinism?

[Anomalocaris]

Simple property of material objects is an artifact of the laws of physics.   It may be a complex emergent artifact of the laws of physics, but nonetheless directly outgrowth of those laws.

This is untrue because evolution depends on chance and large numbers.  Evolution is not determined by the laws of physics, only limited by them.  Again, determinism is not a law of physics.

Observing people making choices is nonsense.   We interpret what we observe to be the making of choices.   But the interpretation is untestable.   The mechanism underlying the observed phenomenon is not understood, so the grounds for the interpretation is wholly absent.   Furthermore it appears the concept of choices is part of a pre-wired cognitive framework, so our interpretation of what we observe may be a case of translation of an unknown script by assuming its contents must be the same as the only English passage we happen to have on hand.

Observing that human choices reduce to the laws of physics is nonsense.  You are making an unwarranted extrapolation based on an argument from analogy.  As you admit, appearances are on the side of free will.  Interpretation or not, we actually observe ourselves and others make choices.  That's why this is still an open issue.

You seem to think chance and large numbers somehow allows occurrences which do not follow precisely and rigorously from laws of physics.   Large number and chance is but s statistical estimate of the generalized implications of laws of physics where power to calculate the exact predictions of laws of physics is as yet lacking.    You confuse contingent unpredictability with non-determinism.

Apparence is worth nothing, so what side it is on is worth nothing.  We are program to attribute appearance of choice to things that happen to people in order make sense of the world using intuitive cognitive mechanisms that has demonstrated to be sadly inadequate to plumbing the underlying mechanism of why things happen in essentially every case where this intuitive mechanism is seriously tested.     The fact that we are programmed to attribute choice to occurrences is demonstrated by our tendency to pretend when we are young that inanimate object make choices.

But any degree of thinking that attempted to adds even the slightest hint of substance to the totally worthless appearance immediately reveals we can not demonstrate at all we have choices.    Indeed we can not conceive of even the faintest hint of any mechanism which would allow choices to be made that can not in principle be predicted through modeling of laws of chemistry and physics, other than through the wooish insinuation of “Chance” and “large number”, which is fundamentally nothing more than the usual resort to the god of the gap.  In this case the gap is created by limits on power of computation and accuracy of description.    So the appearance of choice is a total mirage without substance.

The fact that there seems to you to be a gap into which you think you can insert a belief in choice that is founded solely on your affinity towards the saccharine notion of choice is not an excuse to present that belief as anything more than sheer fantasy.