Responsibility and Moral Agency

Picking up on the line, "you cannot be morally responsible for someone else's free choice/action" from my analysis of Christians' marketing campaign, someone asked:

Does this mean that if I don't teach my children correct values that it is not my responsibility if they misbehave? Columbine parents therefore were not responsible to keep their kids under observation and understand that they were living a murderous and suicidal lifestyle.

You should be held accountable for your choices and actions, and others should be held accountable for theirs. So no, you should not be held responsible for the murder your child commits when he grows up. Perhaps you should be held responsible for your horrid child-rearing. But bad parenting and murder are different: different actors acting on different choices with different levels of moral malfeasance deserving different reactions.

We are in this patch of mental fog because you've focused on examples that flirt with absence of moral agency. Recall that free will is the whole reason for morality -- where is no choice, there's no need for morality, and nothing to judge morally. We don't hold kids, the retarded, the mentally damaged, and the brainwashed accountable in the same way we will hold you accountable for that reason. We don't let people vote, get married, form contracts and so on below certain ages to stay clear of those troubles. When free will is diminished or absent, so is moral action -- moral agency is absent, and so is corresponding moral accountability.

If someone has moral agency then they are responsible for their act. If you act through someone lacking moral agency, then you are responsible in the same way you are responsible when you pull the trigger that hurls the bullet that kills. Guns don't have moral agency, either.

So yep, "you cannot be morally responsible for someone else's FREE choice/action." You're responsible for yours.