- For an interesting take on (1) and (2) i would suggest reading this http://www.amazon.com/Incognito-Secret-Lives-David-Eagleman/... ; I think there's ample evidence there, too.

- You need a tool to "discover" right and wrong, just like you need a metric tensor to measure length. That tool is empiricism.

- If it's not the actor's will, whose is it?

Thanks for an interesting and thoughtful response. :-)

Unfortunately, my reading list is tooo long to add anything new anywhere near the front of the queue, unless it's something that is absolutely earth-shattering. I see that the book you suggest is rated highly on Amazon. But the first review that comes up for me (maybe it's the first one for you, too) is a June 5 review by a neuroscientist (supposedly) who discounts the book as being highly intellectually sloppy.

I actually think we may agree on the second overall bullet point. Which is a lot closer than I thought we were. However, I think certain empiricist philosophers have been pretty mistaken. I'm not an expert in either analytic or continental philosophy, but wasn't Hume the famous empiricist who posed the "is-ought" dichotomy and rejected the possibility of finding any solution to it? Any Rand posed a solution to this problem, and I agree with her. I can provide further references up on request.

On the third bullet point: I think "free will" is properly understood as a person's ability to choose whether or not to think about something. The more they think, the more refined their conclusions become. It's wrong to just claim that people are a product of their genes and environment, which implicitly ignores this thinking process. So to answer the question, the actor's "will" is the key factor here (if you want to use that word), but of course there is nothing supernatural going on.

Eagleman's book is indeed biased and shallow, but not inaccurate, and has a good summary of clinical cases on the subject.