[pete fabrizio]

not to be a philosophy snob, but i don't think there's anything in this thread that isn't covered a hundred times in an undergraduate survey course on free will. people are making a lot of statements or conclusions that they think are dispositive, as if philosophers haven't considered every one of these arguments since aristotle -- and a million articles have been written on the implications that genetics and quantum mechanics have for the debate.

If someone has made a dispositive statement about free will, it would probably be the aforementioned Bertrand Russell, from Why I am Not a Christian:

"If when a man writes a poem or commits a murder, the bodily movements involved in his act result solely from physical causes, it would seem absurd to put up a statue to him in the one case and to hang him in the other."

This doesn't really say much on the question of whether we have free will or not, but it illustrates the necessity of acting as if.