Funny, to me it seems people talk about this one a lot. And the same answer applies. Yes, we have free will and responsibility (because we can respond). Also ye

Funny, to me it seems people talk about this one a lot. And the same answer applies. Yes, we have free will and responsibility (because we can respond). Also yes, we do what we do because of physical mechanisms which means you could say we're "fated" (leaving aside the irrelevant complication of chance and probability). However, the law is only concerned with people doing (codified) wrong. It lets people off for being insane, because dealing with insanity falls outside of its mission. And similarly it can let people off on compassionate grounds, if for instance they stole food due to being hungry due to poverty. Punishing people for bad luck isn't its mission either. And a contract signed under duress isn't supposed to be valid, because the law's mission isn't to enable formalized bullying. Of course in reality the law is sketchy, lacks compassion, fails to recognize forms of duress. But generally speaking the idea is that it's restricted to the bad things a person freely did, as opposed to things that happened to the person. So then you might say, well, do we freely do anything at all, because it's all just physics and mechanisms. But a lot of the mechanisms are in our brains, thinking sanely (if immorally), so yes, we do act freely, when not coerced. It's important to separate the part of fate which is the things we're probably going to think, which is our responsibility, from the part of fate which is the things that the outside world is probably going to do to us, which is outside of our responsibility.