Also, those who insist that we are all fully determined to do as we do tend, paradoxically, to be very moralistic about insisting that this is how everyone ought to think about us.  In effect they believe, “No one ought to believe that people have free will, that they can make genuine choices in their lives; they ought to be thought of as complex machines.”  However, without the capacity to choose, such admonitions are meaningless.

I still don't think this is a good argument for free will.

To defend free will, one needs to show not only that people make choices, but also that their choices are free of antecedent causes.

Let's nip it in the bud. :)

Seriously, you have a different definition of "free will" than I have. My definition has always been that an action is free if it caused by the agent who performs it but is such that no antecedent conditions were sufficient for performing just that action. That's the definition that Nathaniel Branden uses in his book The Psychology of Self-Esteem.

... an action is free if it caused by the agent who performs it but is such that no antecedent [, non-willed] conditions were sufficient for performing just that action.

That's the definition that Nathaniel Branden uses in his book The Psychology of Self-Esteem.

You seem to be using one that is closer to the compatibilist view, which is fine. I have no problem with using the term "free will" in the sense that you're using it. Most people probably use it in that looser sense anyway, but that is not how Objectivism uses it.

Volition will always be the cause and the values will be the context.

Values are that which one acts to gain and/or keep.

Morality does not necessarily imply choice. Morality is that set of views about how to live one's life. Choice, on the other hand, can be something real, actions not entirely determined by prior events, or it can be something illusory, us thinking that our actions are not mechanistically determined by prior events even though they are.

A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.

But a “moral commandment” is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.

My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists—and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these.

Morality pertains only to the sphere of man’s free will—only to those actions which are open to his choice.

A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality.

I can't imagine Nathaniel saying that "[a]n Objectivist's choice to avoid religious worship is determined by his philosophical values and his non-belief in God", and meaning that the Objectivist couldn't choose to go into a church, or choose to become a Catholic (thus ceasing to be an Objectivist).

Historically, the most common view of free will locates man's freedom in his choice of actions. [By "actions" in this context he means physical actions.] This is the view of Epicurus and of the modern Existentialists, for instance. According to this position, man is capable (at least, under certain circumstances) of choosing a particular course of action by direct free will; so that the choice, say, to go to the store for a loaf of bread or to join a political party, can be a causal primary, a "first cause" in consciousness.

The objections to this view are clearly overwhelming. When a man chooses to pursue a given course of action, the cause of his action is the mental operations that precede his choice; these mental operations express and are the result of his values, premises, knowledge and thinking -- whether he is fully aware of it or not....

In the Objectivist theory of volition, a man is responsible for his actions, not because his actions are directly subject to his free will, but because they proceed from his values and premises, which in turn proceed from his thinking or non-thinking.

Every value is not a 'cause' by itself, it arises in a context rich with other values, and emotions and a background of feelings.

Add to that short term versus long term which are both different frameworks for making decisions. We choose to focus, or not. Actually we choose how intently to focus and for how long. And then the thinking sorts the various values out in the context according to how we focus.

Also, we aren't born with values, so they had to be formed/accepted/validated/integrated/prioritized/updated/etc and they are always open to change as time goes by.

I think that Dr. Machan's makes an excellent point. If you are a determinist then words like "ought" and "should" carry no meaning in this context. I can say that a falling object like a rock "should" attain terminal velocity at such and such a point, but that isn't the same context. No one expects the rock to reexamine it's values and change speed so as to do what it "ought" to do.

The first part of this, which asserts that one ought to think correctly, implies that one has a choice in the matter - to think correctly or not.

The second part asserts that it is unlikely that the devout Catholic will find themselves in a context where the amount of choosing that would be required to change such core values so completely as to become an atheist is going to occur. But we know that it does happen.

The fact that the Catholic can, through a series of purely internal choices, become an atheist, without any special outside effects, is the reason that "determinism" is not a valid word to use with human beings.

I don't know why I'm still debating this issue.

"...an action is free if it [is] caused by the agent who performs it but is such that no antecedent conditions were sufficient for performing just that action."

So, would you say that at the age of 9, I could through a series of purely internal choices become an atheist without any special outside effects, i.e., without any new knowledge acquired externally from my environment?

What about my example of a multiple-choice test, in which you have no reason to choose what you recognize as a wrong answer. In that case, you will necessarily choose what you recognize as the right answer. Yet, we can certainly say that you "ought" to choose that answer if you are to answer the question correctly, even though you could not have done otherwise under the circumstances.

The only time when it is totally inappropriate to use the word "belief" is in the case of self-evident or necessary truths. We know that the whole is greater than any of its parts. To say that we believe it is an egregious misunderstanding of the truth being affirmed. The same thing applies to many, but not all, mathematical truths. We know, we do not believe, that two plus two equals four.

I am not saying that is necessarily the case, but rather that when I walk around and observe people acting, I can not see anything that would conclusively rule out that possibility of the illusory nature of choice. I have not observed ANYTHING all day long, while pondering this question, that settles the question.