In my view this would be like: "The best / most intimate knowledge we have of what is causing our physical behaviour at a given time". We're able to know why we raise our hand, why we take avoiding actions, why we choose low fat over regular, etc. Moral competence then comes from interacting with other agents who are also capable of such understanding and expect you to have the same understanding. — Gooseone

The problem with this solution is that all people generally know why they have raised their hand or generally performed any act. They did it because they wanted to. The question of moral responsibility would therefore not rest in your knowledge of why you did it, but it would instead rest in your knowledge of whether it was a right or wrong act. The fact that I know why I shot you (I just sort of felt like it) should not be the determining factor in whether I should be held responsible for it. The fact that I lack the capacity to know right from wrong would make it so that I am not responsible for it. Lack of moral knowledge, or more precisely, an inability to comprehend the difference between right and wrong is often used as the legal definition of insanity and it serves as a defense for criminal acts.
The McNaughton Rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M'Naghten_rules

The problem with this solution is that all people generally know why they have raised their hand or generally performed any act. — Hanover

There are many, many reasons why this may not be true though. Neurological disease, automatic responses (you don't consciously control adjustments to your balance for example), external forces, drunkenness, etc. Knowledge of right and wrong is clearly not part of the consideration of the moral responsibility for involuntary actions. But presumably we would not want to rule out moral responsibility carte blanche for all involuntary actions.

I agree with your overall premise but you're one step beyond my point, you are talking about how to act upon knowledge, I'm trying to see if it's worthwhile to see free will more as a causative knowledge then a causal power.

Like in the often mentioned example of avoiding a brick hurtled towards one, the causal power lies in taking evasive action and if someone asks: "Why did you duck all of a sudden?" I'd say: "I was trying to avoid a brick". Why someone threw that brick is not so much of my concern in this specific (theoretical) instance.

I'm advocating that, in most debates concerning free will, it tends to revolve around how close we can correlate our conscious awareness with our actions while it might be more worthwhile to see in how far there is an awareness of what was / is causing our behaviour.

In the case of playing rock, paper, scissors, we would be playing because we thought it was somehow worthwhile to play along and, while playing, we might have some strategy figured out or try to be as random as possible, etc. yet we would have a sense of agency concerning our action and, up till a point, would be able to explain our motives.

Though we can be primed and our subconscious can be manipulated (maybe in the near future it will be possible to remotely manipulate our proprioception etc.), expecting a direct correlation between our conscious awareness of our actions or expecting to elaborate on physical processes beyond our conscious awareness is a too harsh of a demand to decide on (potential) moral competence. Up till this point in time our own rational explanation of our behaviour has sufficed to be deemed "morally competent" by our peers and I take issue with science concluding that the lack of empiricism in this regard is used as a criteria to state that we are not morally competent.

@ Hanover:

The judicial system is for when we have reason to believe the understanding is there, but there is a lack of competence to act on this understanding. — Gooseone

@ Barry Etheridge

Conversely, if the understanding is there but there is a physical lack of control (some forms of epilepsy, Gehrig's disease, Tourette syndrome) we try to physically aid such persons so that they are able to exercise their free will. — Gooseone

The fact that I know why I shot you (I just sort of felt like it) should not be the determining factor in whether I should be held responsible for it. — Hanover

But why did you feel like it? Reminds me of the Radio Lab show where it mentioned one of the detectives who gave the Green River Killer a series of interviews to try and find out why he killed. They never received a satisfying answer. Probably the killer himself didn't really know why. He just felt like it (rationalized as the women deserved it). Maybe the explanation is neurological or developmental.

...expecting a direct correlation between our conscious awareness of our actions or expecting to elaborate on physical processes beyond our conscious awareness is a too harsh of a demand to decide on (potential) moral competence. — Gooseone

I agree that freewill is really about moral competence or socially constructed habits of self-regulation.

Animals of course are perfectly good at making smart situational choices. They have a biological level of attentional deliberation that you could call ecologically competent.

But then humans have an overlay of language-enabled, socially-focused, deliberation where we are meant to be "moral agents". And this sets up the counterfactuality deemed to be at the heart of free-will.

We are conscious of the fact that we are indeed agents whose actions within social contexts have meanings that need to be judged. There is meant to be a balancing of self interest and collective interest. And so everything that we might think about doing is framed by the rational possibility of not in fact doing that. Our own actions are put at a distance from both ourselves, and our social contexts, to make it possible to then think about those actions in a properly weighted fashion.

So the focus on neurology, or habitual-level actions, is off the mark. All smart animals develop ecological competence. They get good at making decisions in an unselfconscious fashion that allows them to negotiate their worlds efficiently.

But humans - as sociocultural creatures - have the new thing of a culturally developed habit of self-regulation. We are trained to run all our action planning through a social filter. We have to insert the possibility of not acting in the way we are thinking of acting so as to be able to play the part of moral agents in our moral cultures.

The impulsive action deal is then about the fact that intelligent reflex-level motor planning takes about a fifth of a second to organise, while deliberative and attentive level motor planning takes more like half a second, and even longer.

So we can often preconsciously emit a response before we have time to consciously deliberate on a response.

If we are talking about tightly time-constrained action - as is usually the case in neurologically-focused "freewill" experiments - then the best that can be achieved in such circumstances is "free won't".

As the action centres of the brain brew up a quick automatic response that is ecologically competent, that causes the "broadcast" of an anticipatory sensory image - a feeling of what you are just about to do so that you will know it is you causing the sensory change about to happen. If you are going to push a button "at random", then it helps if the whole brain knows to expect fingers to be moving, buttons to be felt on finger-tips, etc, in a way that won't be sensorily confusing and alien as it happens.

And it is this anticipatory image that can be caught at the conscious attentive level as "the moment of decision". And if you set things up so that you want to block that rising impulse by a countering "don't", then that is another objective you can set yourself up primed for. You can halt an urge in its tracks, with enough prior preparation and careful attention.

So the point is that we are well set up for two levels of willing.

At the biological level, we are very good at automating smart action habits. That's how we can climb stairs or hit tennis balls with minimal attentive effort.

Then at the social level, we are very good at moral deliberation and viewing our actions through a self-regulatory lens. This is particularly so when we have a normal amount of time - seconds, hours, days - to make such behavioural choices.

But most "freewill" research gets these two levels of action mixed up, believing freewill is somehow an aspect of biological consciousness. So the research tries to atomise freewill by analysing human action on the smallest possible temporal grain. You get the vexed question of whether conscious deliberation caused the preconscious gestation of some actual decision to press a button, or whatever.

So the freewill debate is just another example of the atomising tendency in causal explanation. It manufactures its own paradoxes by trying to analyse deliberative choice as if it were reductionistly simple.

But even at the biological level in animals, the brain is set up to balance fast unthinking habits against slower attentive deliberation. And in humans, there is a further learnt habit of negotiating between the personal and the social in making decisions - which itself has to execute on timescales ranging from the impulsive to the "however long it takes to work through all the information and variables".

I guess I'm trying to advocate your stance in a simpler manner; free will can be complicated to a large extent if common knowledge does not incorporate the abstract realm in which free will tends to operate (social constructions) ...that is, in fact, the whole point...

If our social constructions, consciousness, daily emotional interactions. etc. are not interpreted as a given, then the way we judge free will does not incorporate the level at which physical actions becomes relevant to us while the conclusions 'are' relevant to that level.

Could it be pragmatic to stop associating free will with action and associate it with knowledge?
In my view this would be like: "The best / most intimate knowledge we have of what is causing our physical behaviour at a given time". We're able to know why we raise our hand, why we take avoiding actions, why we choose low fat over regular, etc. Moral competence then comes from interacting with other agents who are also capable of such understanding and expect you to have the same understanding. If we see "morally incompetent" behaviour we tend to look for the underlying reasons, if we then conclude there is a lack of understanding we generally do not hold such people responsible but do take away (a degree) of their rights to exercise free will. Conversely, if the understanding is there but there is a physical lack of control (some forms of epilepsy, Gehrig's disease, Tourette syndrome) we try to physically aid such persons so that they are able to exercise their free will. The judicial system is for when we have reason to believe the understanding is there, but there is a lack of competence to act on this understanding.

I feel that it is unfounded to use (the limits of) our conscious action capacity as a means to gain a supposed "understanding" of our behaviour on the whole which supersedes the individual understanding which suffices enough for us to deem ourselves morally competent. Priming individuals with the understanding of our behaviour on the whole (= free will does not exist) has an influence on their behaviour and that in itself shows to me that, when talking about free will, it matters more what we understand then the degree in which we deem actions volitional. — Gooseone

Thanks to yin-yang dynamics demonstrably ruling reality as we know it pattern matching rules the universe including the human brain and applies to whatever we may wish to call free will indicating that without faith in our free will we have none just as without faith in our own knowledge and awareness we can have none. Recently it was revealed that epilepsy is related to the absence of a protein responsible for contextual memory in the hypothalmus implying there is ultimately no way for us to distinguish between memory and awareness and explaining such things as why the human brain has over a petabyte of data storage capacity, yet, human memory is notoriously fallible. While that might sound speculative to skeptics, it means very soon modern science will be able to follow Alice into Wonderland in the human mind and brain and provide all the empirical evidence anyone could ask for.