• From the individual's standpoint: A person's appraisal of his own responsibility affects the strength of his feelings about guilt, remorse, and worries about secular and higher judging powers such as those claimed to exist by various ideologies and religions.
• From society's point of view: The penal system, just distribution of burdens and benefits, legal and moral obligation, merit, and duty all depend on the correct evaluation of responsibility.
• From a religious perspective: If responsibility for freedom to decide and act is incorrectly assessed, it will have adverse consequences. If too much responsibility is assigned, religions will promote harmful guilt and pernicious punishment. If too little responsibility is assigned, religions will result in injurious permissiveness and rewards for the undeserving.

• 13,700 million years ago, from its uncaused beginnings, observed as the Big Bang, the universe evolved, until the appearance of modern humans, entirely by a natural "mechanical" causality. For the macro steps of this development see the "Timeline: Big Bang to Modern Era." For an explanation of the concept causality see Cause and Effect Relationships.
• 600 million years ago, the first animals, sponges, with no nerve cells and no locomotion appeared. Next came jellyfish that had the first nerve cells (neurons) in the form of a simple net but with no central nervous system, the brain with a spinal cord. And then flatworms evolved with the first rudimentary brain. Also, they had eyespots and the components of both sexes in one individual. For the other steps that led to the human brain see the "Timeline: Evolution of the Brain."
• 1/5 of a million years ago, a mind-determined "conscious" causality emerged with the appearance of modern humans and their large brains. From there on, at least on Planet Earth, a mind-generated causality operated in addition to a now not anymore all-determining natural or "mechanical" causality. The latest evolutionary part of the brain, an exceptionally large neocortex in humans, facilitated the "emergence" of higher mental functions:

1. Humans, to a degree, were able to free themselves from the chain of a "mechanical" causality that had governed the existence of everything including the various life forms.
2. Humans had become aware of themselves as demonstrated by an  individual's self-recognition and conscious experience, as stored in memory, of a distinct, personal identity that is separate from all other people and things. Literally, in humans, the universe had become conscious of itself.
3. Humans could better communicate, anticipate and plan for the future, and most importantly, they could pass on culture to succeeding generations and form socially advanced societies. See the section The Social Sphere.
4. The mindless control by hereditary instincts was curtailed because humans could think about their thinking and evaluate the consequences of their actions. The result was moral thinking that allowed them to control, temper, modify, and improve their instincts and emotions.
5. Intellectual skills evolved as required, for instance, in establishing knowledge, problem solving, and decision making. See the section The Intellectual World.
6. Humans explanation-demanding, immense curiosity motivated reasoning and thinking. This led to a body of human knowledge as formed by its various branches (see Division of Knowledge by Disciplines). Here Knowledge of ethics is paramount because it governs the codification of morality and law, the rules of behavior.

• Reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses.

• It is a faculty that man has to exercise by choice. Thinking is not an automatic function.

• In any hour and issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort.

• Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. The act of focusing one's consciousness is volitional.

• Man can focus his mind to a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of reality - or he can unfocus it and let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance stimulus of the immediate moment, at the mercy of his undirected sensory-perceptual mechanism and of any random, associational connections it might happen to make.

                                                                 Ayn Rand (1905-82, my bullets)

     Ayn Rand was a novelist and philosopher. She called her philosophical system “objectivism.” It made valuable contributions to the theory of knowledge and reasoning. However, as she claimed, laissez-faire capitalism (a predatory form of capitalism) and egoism does not logically and factually follow from objectivism. She stated, "I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows" (Rand, Ayn, September 1971: "Brief Summary". The Objectivist 10 (9): 1). And she rejects one of the noblest virtues when she writes: “If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.” This writer finds her social philosophy repugnant because it provides antisocial justifications for a few who gain more freedom and well being at the expense of the many.

C.               Free Will, Determinism, and Compatibilism

1.                   The Belief in Free Will is Widely Accepted

• because there is a strong subjective experience of freedom when one makes a choice, for a person has a conscious image of an objective, a conscious desire to achieve it, and awareness of how to achieve it.
• because there is the intuition that our will is a faculty distinct from our desires, and that it is not a mere passive thing.
• because the universal assumption of responsibility for personal actions that underlies the concepts of law, reward, punishment, and incentive.
• because of sentiments of guilt and remorse.
• because of the world religions that explain human suffering as self-inflicted on account of "original sin" by our earliest ancestors in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, and on account of transgressions in a prior life in the Eastern dharma-karma religions.
• because we are also conscious that if our desires act powerfully upon our will, our will can in its turn act upon our desires. We can strengthen the natural powers of our will by steadily exerting it. We can diminish the intensity of our desires by habitually repressing them; we can alter, by a process of mental discipline, the whole symmetry of our passions, deliberately selecting one class for gratification and for development, and crushing and subduing the others.

1. Fully responsible would be a being when its capacity to know, to have foresight, and to act has no limitations. This individual would be completely autonomous or self-governing. However, as far as we know such an all-knowing and all-powerful individual exists only as an ideal. The strong version of free will moves in this direction.
2. Partially responsible would be those whose ability to act responsibly is reduced by their mind's limitations or their limitation to act freely. Responsibility would depend on:
   a. their capacity of knowing and acting freely at the time of conduct,
   b. their prudence exercised in taking advantage of the opportunities
       to acquire these capacities prior to conduct,
   c. their capacity for prudence, that is, the ability of exercising sound
      judgment in matters of managing one's own and society's interest.
   The correct version of compatibilism, which is internally consistent and coherent, explains and supports this position.
3. Entirely not responsible would be beings whose decisions and actions are completely determined by prior events over which they have no control. For example, the seriously mentally challenged and probably all animals fall into this group. The strong version of determinism moves in this direction.
4. The above exhausts all possibilities. The "fully responsible" do not exist, the "entirely not responsible" are wholly blameless, and only the "partially responsible" are liable.