If everything has a prior cause, what does moral responsibility actually mean?

[DudleyBoy]

If every single action ultimately traces back through an unbroken chain of prior causes, genes, upbringing, immediate circumstance, brain chemistry, all the way back further than anyone could ever practically trace, in what coherent sense did anyone actually choose to do anything freely at all, and if they genuinely did not, what is moral responsibility for that action even supposed to mean in the first place. This question sits squarely at the direct intersection of the free will debate from earlier in this forum and the entire practical business of praise, blame, punishment and reward that every single human society, without exception, actually depends on functioning smoothly and reliably in order to hold together at all.

Hard incompatibilists bite the bullet fully here and argue that genuine, deep desert based responsibility, the specific idea that someone deserves punishment or reward in some deep cosmic sense purely because of what they freely chose to do, simply does not exist in a fully determined universe. On this stark view, punishment can still be justified, but only on entirely forward looking, practical grounds, deterrence, rehabilitation, protecting others from further harm, rather than on the backward looking idea that someone has genuinely earned or deserves suffering purely because of a past choice they supposedly could have made differently under identical circumstances.

Compatibilists, once again, offer a different, more moderate path, arguing that responsibility never actually required the kind of ultimate, universe defying free will that hard incompatibilists are busy denying in the first place. What matters instead, they argue, is whether an action flowed from a person's own considered reasoning, genuine values, and stable character, rather than from external coercion, severe compulsion, or serious mental illness. On this considerably more modest view, a person can be held fully responsible for an action even in a completely deterministic universe, because responsibility was always fundamentally about the reliable source of the action rather than about some deeper, ultimate metaphysical freedom from causation altogether.

How this eventually gets resolved carries real practical stakes well beyond pure abstract philosophy, showing up directly in ongoing debates over criminal justice reform, over how heavily we should weigh childhood trauma and disadvantaged circumstance in sentencing decisions, and over whether an entire justice system oriented purely around retribution can remain genuinely coherent at all once we take seriously just how much of any individual person's character was actually shaped by prior forces they themselves never actually chose or consented to in any meaningful sense.