On (1): I've never been able to figure out blame to my satisfaction. Lets put the politics aside. You wouldn't blame a car or a toaster for performing its function -- after all, these are just machines. But wait, you, reader, are a machine as well (at least if we accept that everything is reducible to electrons and protons and neutrons).

Caplan seems to get at something similar when he considers the excuse "he couldn't help what he does." If we accept it once, he says -- e.g., to say that alcoholics aren't truly responsible -- then we have to accept it all the time. Sounds right -- all of us are biochemical machines and none of us can "help" what we do.

Somehow the notion of blame seems to implicitly refer to a notion of free will -- we talk about choices we could have made -- and there seems to be little space for free will in physics, either in Newtonian or quantum mechanics.

There are ways out of this but most have them have the feature of saying "When you talk about blame you *really talk about ..... " and none of them feel all that satisfactory to me.