So, in short, do think there are alternatives to the "free will" model of personal responsibility which would be acceptable to the person in the street, i.e. be easy enough to understand and seem consistent with common modern notions of justice and fairness? — Janus

If you are interested in what people in the street (and perhaps also in courts of law and ethics committees) think about "free will", then perhaps, rather than trying to invent free will from scratch, deduce it from the meanings and etymologies of individual words, or from the agglomeration of historical writings and their exegeses, and then asking whether your model is acceptable, a better approach would be to try to first find out what free will, as well as related notions like agency and moral responsibility, mean to people.

To some extent, this approach has been taken by analytical philosophers in the latter half of the 20th century, although they were mostly posing rhetorical questions to themselves and to their colleagues - but nevertheless the intention was to take into account common meanings and real-life functions. A more empirical approach has been pursued in cognitive and social sciences in the last few decades, and it is at the interface with these areas where I think the most relevant philosophy is taking place.

To begin with the question of justice, I'm not that convinced that there really is any univocal understanding of 'modern' justice. I say this insofar as I'm cognisant of the raging debates that take place in modern philosophy over exactly this question, and understand it to be a rather open field. — StreetlightX

I did not have contemporary philosophical debates about the understanding of justice so much in mind, though, but rather what would be considered to be common notions of justice, as they are (imperfectly of course) embodied in law and everyday people's everyday attitudes. The reason I think this is important is that whatever philosophers might think about moral responsibility, culpability and justice; if those thoughts are ever to be socially relevant and efficacious, then they would need to be understandable and acceptable to the "average" philosophically uneducated person.

So, if my thought that ancient notions of personal responsibility and culpability were consistent with understandings of justice that we could refer to as "revenge" or "retributive' models, then those ancient understandings would likely not be acceptable to most contemporary people.

I remain convinced that the average contemporary (Western at least) understandings of moral responsibility etc. are logically based on the idea that an individual could have done otherwise, or else the conclusion would be diminished responsibility and that they would not bear (at least full) moral responsibility for their acts.

Apart from that I agree with much of what you say, it's just that it does not seem relevant to the question I am interested in.

I was not thinking of hunter/gatherers but predominately of the ancient Greeks and Hebrews. I'm no scholar of those cultures, so of course I am open to correction and/ or new information.

This sounds more like the kind of approach I am imagining.