When it comes to the virtue of good choices and the consequences of poor choices, people tend to reference a privilege granted by the gods. Free speech! The freedom to choose a path that would ultimately define our moral character.

In reality, there are only two ways of looking at it and both make it irrelevant. Free speech is either absolute or fictitious; depending on your personal preference.

Free speech can be seen as absolute if we acknowledge that every conscious entity has the freedom to choose at all times at any given situation. from this perspective, free will is a default and a scenario where there is no free will is impossible. A free man and an inmate have just as much free will; they both can do whatever they want within their own situation. The free man can choose to get in a car and drive to the sunset, or to go to the movies, and the inmate can choose to stand up or to sit down, even if he was completely immobilized, there will always be a choice to make, whether it is a particular thought or a small action like blinking.

On the other hand, free will can be seen as a made up concept. we are always limited by something, the ability to choose a path is meaningless compared to the ability to choose the circumstances that might limit our options. A free man in Mexico can do many things that an incarcerated man just can't, therefore one could assume that the free man has more free will than the convicted criminal. However, I think that free will can't be measured, I think you either have it or don't have it. A free man in London can choose to go commit a crime at the London Tower, and the Mexican can't, and so, the Mexican can choose to do the same in a Mexican location. who has more free will?

In both cases, free will is irrelevant, due to the fact that free will is a bullshit excuse to take the blame off from God and put it on to men. if free will exists it is absolute, we have free will by default, therefore, it could not have been granted by a deity and the argument of a loving God that gave us the freedom to choose our paths goes down the drain. If there is no free will that means that we are not doing what we want but what we can. The reason for us burning in hell wouldn't be so much because of our poor choices but because of God putting us in fucked up scenarios (like putting the tree of knowledge in paradise knowing eve would succumb to temptation).

Both perspectives are valid, but I personally think that we have no free will and our actions depend directly on the situation.