Reread what Tip has said.  It’s there.  Babe

This is an interesting dilemma. I can’t help but get the sense that these discussions of responsibility and free will vs. determinism seem predicated on the party in question being outside of (or apart from) the system being observed.

This separation allows the question to be posed as one of that party controlling events vs. merely being along for the ride. (That’s a pretty strict either-or dichotomy, which is a reservation I’ll leave aside for the moment.) If we discount the existence of such an outside entity, what happens to the question? What “party” is there that could be considered either the passenger or agent of these actions/events?

It seems (based on my totally uneducated judgement) that a strict logical positivist analysis would insist that there is no entity in a position to have such an interactive relationship with the actions in question. The entity is the actions.

Really, the bulk of meaning that we associate with such entities consists of our own intellectual and emotional responses to it. These are obviously separate and distinct from the physical reality of the entity in question, because they are actually elements of our own physical realities. It is through these projections that we interact with the entity, and we build conceptual frameworks to house them in. I suspect the best of us often have difficulty distinguishing between our conception and the reality, and perhaps this is a reason we insist – whether we are batting for free will or for determinism – that there must be something else there to define a causal relationship between. Even though it’s like dividing by zero, we insist on trying. Then we argue over what the answer is, when the question doesn’t even make sense.
  
“In a sense we already half way acknowledge that some people are not exercising complete control – as long as it’s “other people” and not ourselves”

I would go a step further and say that many people (if not most) feel that they do lack complete control over their own behavior, whether it be losing weight, quitting addictions, posting on blogs, or any number of things. But that seems different than asserting that one has absolutely no control over anything they do. Once you’ve granted even partial control, is it still determinism?

I have no problem saying that Loughner made evil choices. And that his brain was totally screwed up (though this does raise the question of standards). I’d say the fact that his brain was totally screwed up is why he made evil choices. I don’t want to condede the word “evil” to the religious fundamentalists any more than I want to concede the word “good” to them. I see no more reason to deny the evil nature of his actions than I do in denying the beauty of a Debussy melody, even though I know it is reducible to basic physics. I acknowledge these aren’t scientific statements, and I dare say the language in question wasn’t formulated for such purposes. I’m not sure I’d enjoy being around someone who insisted that all such “non-objective” expressions of human experience are worthless. Maybe if I were alone in a world of computers that would make sense.

And a criminal justice system that is grounded in rehabilitation-over-punishment and systems-over-individuals – or “what works” (to what end is not specified) – would probably have a hard time justifying the continued pursuit of Nazi war criminals without ceding at least some ground to the legitimacy of alternative concerns. That’s where I usually find myself – not arguing for one extreme or the other, but against the exclusivity of either. 

It seems that another name for “experimental philosophy” might be “philosophical psychology” or “psychological philosophy.”  The experiments seem to consist of dubious surveys about what random people think about the topic.  Marrying social science and philosophy doesn’t improve either discipline’s ability to be “scientific.”