For that reason I strongly disagree with the compatibilist view - language is defined by use, and most people act in ways that clearly signal a non-compatibilist view of free will.
So, a compatibilist view is not incompatible with the world we live in, but moreover, it is needed to keep our world functioning. The world we live in is mostly artificially constructed. Welfare and justice systems are not "genuine", they are artificial constructs. They play a role in our society and the ideas of "free will" and "guilt" are constructed also, and they are tweaked to make our systems to work better. If you assume that free will and guilt are "genuine" or God given, then you can't tune them to better match their purposes. You are losing agency this way, losing part of your free will, you can't consciously and reasonably discuss if state of affect should be an exception from the rule "any person has a free will". You'll be forced either to skip the discussion, or to resort to some kind of theological arguments.
But if you accept, that "free will" is a social construct, then you can easily identify the affected variables: it is all about punishment for crimes or awarding people for their pro-social deeds. You can think of how "state of affect inhibits free will" can influence all these goals, you can think of the possibility of people simulating state of affect (or even nurturing their personal traits that increase the probability of entering state of affect) to avoid a punishment. You can think rationally, logically and to pick a solution that benefits the society the best. Those very society with baked in idea of free will. Or you can choose to believe "free will" is God given, because of an irrelevant linguistic argument, and lose the ability to make our world better.
> most people act in ways that clearly signal a non-compatibilist view of free will.
Of course, we are not living in quantum mechanics we live in a world that is constructed by people. I mean, all this is built on top of QM, but QM laws do not manifest themselves directly for us. We have other explanatory structures to deal with everyday physics. But even physics doesn't matter that much: I turn the switch and voila I have light, and the heck with conservation of energy. I can talk to you, despite we are residing on different continents, 1000s of km don't matter. If I want to eat I do not try to kill some animal to eat it nor do I gather seeds and roots in a wild to eat them. I go to work and do something, get my salary and buy food in a local store. We are living in an artificial world with artificial rules. Free will is part of this world. Of course we talk about it like it exists. We talk about it like it is a universal truth. Relativity I mentioned above doesn't show itself most of the time, because the world is constructed in a way, when we can agree about someone having it. Situations when this is not the case are very strange and can be even punished: manipulation (which is come close to taking people's agency away from them) is deemed amoral.
The world constructed so we can ignore that free will is just an illusion, moreover it is constructed to think about it in terms of free will, so you'll have issues thinking about it in other terms. Like you'll have a lot of issues trying to calculate aerodynamic of a plane relying on equations of quantum mechanics.
People who at least genuinely believe in free will and agency has an excuse if they e.g. support punishment that is not strictly aimed at minimising harm including to the perpetrator. A compatibilist has no excuse.
It is of course possible to hold a compatibilist view and still argue we should restructure society to treat people as if they do not have agency, but then the point on holding onto the illusion drops to near zero.
Is thermodynamics immoral? You see, there is nothing fundamental about pressure or temperature, they are just statistical averages, they are all in imagination, it is an illusion. But we still pretend that pressure and temperature exist.
Or what about biological species? If you look into it, you'll see that there is no clear way to define what species are, all the definitions are imperfect projections of our high-level illusions onto the underlying biology and biochemistry. But we (and biologists also, who much more aware of the issues) still pretend that species exist. Are biologists immoral?
Nothing wrong with it. Nothing immoral, it is just a regular mental tool. You see, the question is what does it mean for thing to exist. Some things are easy: like there is a car, we can see it, we can touch it, we can drive it, therefore we agree that the car exists. But some things are not so easy, especially when we talk about immaterial things. But to make things even more interesting, some things seem to exist on some level, and do not exist on other levels. Like life for example. There is no life in an atom of carbon or hydrogen or nitrogen, but the bunch of such atoms connected just right can be alive. And it normally don't make people jumpy. At the some time some people have issues with the idea that free will exists on some levels but not others.
> People who at least genuinely believe in free will and agency has an excuse if they e.g. support punishment that is not strictly aimed at minimising harm including to the perpetrator. A compatibilist has no excuse.
Yea. I don't believe in free will and agency "genuinely", so I have no excuse. But I believe that any such excuses are borderline immoral. If anyone allows their emotions and animal instincts to take over them and act against the greater good of a society, it is immoral. I mean, if they do it for their own gain, it may be not immoral, there is a tradeoff between interests of a society and interests of an individual, and sometimes we should prefer the former and sometimes the latter. So going against the society interests is not inherently bad. But doing it because of uncontrollable emotions and animal instincts is bad. It still counts as an excuse, but I'm not sure if it is a good thing. I should believe that this is a good thing, because I don't know how to test it experimentally without risking to harm people even more. But still while I can accepts excuses of others, I don't accept such excuses from me. I just don't let myself to let emotions drive without any oversight from me (whatever this "me" is: this is one more interesting question without any good answers).
The point is: my "non-genuine" belief in free will make me much more free willed than a genuine belief. If I succumbed to my emotions and didn't control myself for three seconds, I'd see it as my personal failure. In my head I'm in control, not someone or something else.
> It is of course possible to hold a compatibilist view and still argue we should restructure society to treat people as if they do not have agency
No point in it. It is like arguing "lets forget thermodynamics and resort to pure QM because it is closer to fundamental laws of the Universe". We need the idea of free will, even if it doesn't hold on fundamental level.
