Really, I'm not sure what Rousseau even wants at this point.
Abandonment of the term "free will" as an address relating to responsibility?
I don't see what's so wrong with saying "I had free will in my decision to do the thing" instead of "I was responsible for doing the thing".
Maybe my point still isn't getting across, I thought I'd stated it relatively clearly, but it seems like it's not getting there.
There's nothing wrong with saying 'I had free will', this is just common lingo that indicates a person hasn't been coerced, and is free to be what they are (what a human being is / how they operate). But when you try to take the term 'free will' any deeper than that, and build a philosophy of freedom out of it, you're using a term which doesn't refer to any actual thing. It's a referent without a concrete definition, all that it indicates when used in everyday language is that a person felt free to carry out an action.
So you can't prove or disprove the existence of free will - unless you just want to call it 'people being free to be what they are' - you shouldn't even try, because it's not a real, objective thing. The conversation on the subject has already been started assuming that we can prove or disprove free will, but IMO that's entirely wrong-headed. We're starting with a conclusion that it can or cannot exist, when in practice we're arguing over whether a unicorn can exist. What you
can do is explicate on how humans actually operate, which doesn't require any kind of subjective qualifier. You could call how humans operate 'freedom' if you wanted to, or 'lack of freedom', but that's ultimately a subjective judgement.
It's like the argument on capitalism/socialism - the foundation of the argument is based on the wrong premises, but nobody can see it and just keeps talking about the wrong thing.
Fundamentally, I don't think you and I are saying totally different things. You're just calling your description of 'how people operate' ipso facto free will, while I don't think you need to call it anything, and I don't think describing how people operate as 'free will' really adds to our understanding. To be clear I'm
not saying that free will doesn't exist, or that it does exist, I'm saying that the term isn't really required to add to our understanding on human behavior and function. The world keeps spinning in circles trying to prove or disprove a unicorn, when we could just be talking about what's actually there, and how it works.
If that doesn't get you there, I'm not sure I can do much better.