Is Moral Responsibility Compatible With Determinism?

[Alan V]

No, it is not "all stimulus response."  You are completely overlooking motivated selective focus, the human ability to suppress reactions, and conflicting desires, not all of which can be followed at one time.

Vulcanlogician,

The problem with saying that all motivated selective focus is unconscious is that it isn't. Much of it is decidedly due to conscious efforts practicing behaviors for the future, even more is because of past conscious efforts which became habitual, and even more is because of consciousness overseeing and modifying, in real time, the playout of habitual behaviors. These contentions are in no way unusual in psychological studies of how humans actually work.

Are you a Freudian?

And you still haven't addressed the difference between reasoning to make decisions and direct material causation, which is the discrimination I assert the concept of free will maintains. Reasons are not the same thing as stimuli because of the level of abstraction involved. Reasons are generated in our brains as glosses of large categories of potential stimuli. We therefore don't even have to be paying attention to the world at all to act on reasons.

I would think a philosopher would be very concerned to maintain the discrimination between automatic behaviors and reasoned ones. Otherwise you undercut your own endeavors.

My whole point with mentioning conflicting desires and suppressing reactions is that they raise the execution of actions to the level of reasoning. Otherwise we could simply let our habits play out with minimal supervision.

You are defining the human self as a foreign object imposed on us from without. Where exactly are we in that view of the world? If I am indeed a material object, as I maintain, then I have at least as much causal effectiveness as any other material object in the world, and really much more since I have a much wider range of options than, say, a rock.

As far as I am concerned, you continue to beg the question of whether reductionism is true. What I am saying is that you need much better reasons to abandon a common-sense, observation-based concept of free will than you apparently have. I personally think the "appearances" of our direct observations carry much more weight, at least until scientific research into this subject has progressed a lot further.