Regarding the possible validity of the concept of Free Will, when we are moved to ask whether humans actually could have a capacity for free will we don’t ultimately mean to enquire whether we might have a capacity for amoral autonomy – like whether we could in principle decide with unqualified self-reference which sweet-meat to prefer for dessert – but rather whether humans could possibly posses a capacity of autonomy regarding morally relevant descions. In this regard it might be observed that moral ‘knowledge’ seems not to be apprehensible intellectually, and therefore acquirable vicariously, but in practice is perhaps a type of understanding that can be inculcated only through personal experience. As an example of this: The principle that there exists a fundamental distinction between happiness and pleasure is commonly received as an intellectual truth yet nonetheless we can presumably all accept that in practice most adherents to this precept paradoxically exhibit behavioural patterns seeming ostensibly oblivious of it. So it seems to be the same with the personal observation of, for example, the general moral precepts outlined in the biblical Ten Commandments: A morally informed perception of the nature of say, Theft, as an act for example, seems perhaps to be an entirely distinct thing from a merely intellectual acceptance of the iniquity of this transgression, inasmuch as in practice the latter type of acceptance routinely proves to be perfectly reconcilable with a capacity to commit the offence while the former type of concept, in contrast, frequently seems inimical to such a capacity, like as in another – albeit a bit clichéd example – how when sometimes a combat hardened soldier is found to avow that as a result of his experiences he knows himself to be fundamentally incapable of killing again. – There exists a theory that such ‘knowledge’ could enable a capacity for moral autonomy the validity of which need not in principle be regarded as contingent on establishing as a logical prerequisite a neurologically based capacity for amoral autonomy.
The idea, again concerning the example of the combat-hardened soldier, is that his experience of killing as an act - being such that his training no matter how rigorous and sustained had not enabled him to anticipate - had conferred on him a moral knowledge that was inimical to being ‘bought’ and which enabled him to knowingly transcend the otherwise unconscious neural determinants constituted by external environmental influence thus enabling in him a capacity of moral autonomy which in practice constitutes an exemplification of acquired ‘Free Will’.