it is reasonable to accept as an objective fact that we are morally responsible causal agents.
What you say makes sense but there are many who would challenge that premise saying that due to deterministic cause and effect, free will is an illusion and we are ultimately not causal agents.
Those arguments presuppose determinism without establishing determinism as a fact, which is to say that they are invalid arguments.
To be a causal agent, one would need to create an uncaused cause.
That’s nonsense, to be a causal agent we merely need the ability to foresee the consequences of our actions, deliberate, choose among alternatives, and act in accordance with those preceding conclusions.
Consciousness has causal influence due to its content, not solely because of the physical aspects of its neural correlates. A conscious state includes a desire or intention, it includes the ability to envision a future state and establish a strategy for attaining that state. That makes it more than a purely physical state, it is a conscious state with reference to a future possibility, and no such reference is part of any purely physical state. Such conscious states can have causal effect to bring about further states for the sake of values, purposes, and intents, which are not reducible to the purely physical state of your argument.
I am undecided as I haven't been able to disprove that notion.
Either you aren’t trying very hard or you haven’t given it any thought at all then. It only takes a cursory understanding of science to see that notion has been proven false for well over a century.
Determinism requires the complete causal closure of the material world; science has not even come close to establishing the causal closure of the material world.
Determinism was just a thought experiment 200 years ago, what Laplace (and before him Leibnitz) proposed, was explicitly that, IF the mathematics we apply to our physical systems is consistent and complete, which is to say that mathematics itself is completely deterministic (Godel proved that it isn’t), AND reality is completely circumscribed by Newtonian mechanics (and it isn’t), AND the motion of every particle in the universe can in principle be predicted from exact knowledge of its position, momentum, and the forces acting on it (and it can’t), AND everything occurred within a single, universal reference frame where an absolute Euclidean space and an absolute time that passes uniformly, are independent aspects of reality (and they aren’t), THEN “theoretically”, all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by purely physical causes such that, there is one and only one possible effect for a particular cause or set of causes, (and there isn’t).
The two most prevailing scientific theories, Relativity Theory and Quantum Physics are explicit that reality is not the Newtonian World Machine that Laplace believed in, and Heisenberg showed us that even in principle, adequate knowledge of a particle’s position, momentum, and the forces acting on it are impossible, the requisite exactness of those quantities just doesn’t occur in the real world.
How do you respond to the assertion that any action you take is due not to a choice, but to the realization of your preferences which you did not choose but were created through cause and effect from external forces (genetics, environment, society, etc).
I’d respond that the denial of the experiential reality of every waking moment, and the negation of the validity of every moral and legal system found in every known time and place where humans have ever existed is an extraordinary claim which necessarily requires extraordinary evidence, and no evidence whatsoever doesn’t qualify as extraordinary.
