I have three responses to this objection: 1) this is an ad hominem attack; 2) on no free will you still must take responsibility in some sense, and 3) a reverse psychoanalysis can be given against adherents of free will.
Point 1: Ad hominem
This is an ad hominem attack that says: “The only reason for someone to argue for the no free will view is because they want to excuse their moral failings or their general failings in life.”
The good aspect of this objection is that the objector has some data – people rejecting free will – and wants to explain that data through a psychoanalytic theory. If you think the arguments for free will skepticism are so bad that no one could take them seriously, then you might think that the arguments for free will skepticism fail to explain adherence to free will skepticism and there must be something psychological going on.
These kinds of psychoanalytic theories are common. Christians will say that atheists reject Christianity not because they have good reasons for doing so, but because atheists want to sin guilt-free. Atheists will say that Christian belief is grounded in wishful thinking.
Atheists cannot appeal to the truth of Christianity to explain Christian belief, so atheists are forced into an alternative explanation, and inevitably this will be an unflattering psychoanalysis. Neither can Christians appeal to the devastating strength of the arguments against Christianity to explain (even a single case of) rejection of Christianity, and so they too are forced into unflattering psychoanalyses of non-Christians, probably involving the noetic effects of sin (God giving them up to their sin) or free will poorly exercised (or, in William Lane Craig's middle knowledge story, some people reject Christianity in all feasible worlds). (Caveat: Some Christians and/or atheists may subscribe to doxastic permissivism which says there are multiple competing rational views on an issue. Folks who are permissivists can disagree with their opposition without relying on unflattering psychoanalyses thereof.)
Likewise, believers in free will cannot appeal to the truth of free will skepticism to explain belief in free will skepticism, and may themselves feel forced into giving an unflattering psychoanalysis to explain belief in free will skepticism. This especially applies in cases of minority views; when you see that only 11% of philosophers believe in free will skepticism, you might think there's got to be something wrong with free will skeptics.
But if we were to unpack your beliefs, we certainly would find some that have an 11% or less adherence rate by professional philosophers. Are we then to conclude that something is wrong with you?
The ad hominem immediately runs into the problem of the actual strength of the arguments for free will skepticism. If you think the arguments against free will are that bad, then you cannot just state this – you must show it. This is why ad hominems are fallacies of irrelevance – the arguments against free will are not addressed by this objection. Until the arguments against free will are addressed, you admit that for all you know it's the strength of these arguments that explains belief in free will skepticism.
Point 2: You still have to take moral responsibility in some sense
The worry is that rejecting free will gives one a license to do whatever irrational things they want because 'It's not my fault', 'I can't be blamed', or 'I was always going to do that.'
But this doesn't work even on the no free will view, because you still have critical blame – beholding the badness of what you are. Naturally, you wish to behold the goodness of what you are.
In court room settings, the fact that you committed a crime without free will is irrelevant. We don't need retributive punishment or just deserts to make sense of courts in general. The court system, in theory, punishes people based on the badness of what they are. If someone is a danger to society, then it makes sense to quarantine them. It makes sense to punish behavior to generate those inputs that will cause a future disinclination of that behavior, either in those who are punished or in those who hear about the punishment. It further makes sense to punish behavior when failing to do so would generate social unrest.
You still have to live with yourself and your choices, so it's still in your best interest to be the best you can be and to make the best choices you can.
Point 3: Psychoanalysis of those who believe in free will
The problem with any psychoanalysis is that two can play that game. Per the no free will view, everyone who wrongs me is not at fault for their wrongs. If anything, I am biased, as all humans are, to believe that those who wrong me are at fault for their wrongs. Of course, on my system, I can take a bifurcated view where I acknowledge the badness of those who wrong me while also acknowledging that their badness is not their fault.
Some folks may be biased toward free will because of other views they have. Christians may feel forced to believe in free will due to how responsible for our sin the Bible makes us out to be.
On the no free will view, you ought to forgive those who wrong you in the sense of letting go of any sense of moral protest or hatred. Some people might prefer to hold a grudge or want to rationalize their hatred. But if those who wronged you were never free, then your hatred of them never made sense. You might hate the poor quality of the person qua organism, but you should feel sorry for the person qua conscious subject who is trapped in a low quality organism against their will. On the no free will view, all blame is victim blaming. The murderer was just as much in the wrong place at the wrong time (genetics, social inputs, brain structure, etc.) in the chain of causes leading up to them becoming a murderer as their victims were. For some people, realizing that their hatred was wrong the whole time would require a humbling admission, and a general significant change of mind they may be unwilling to undergo.
When bad things happen to people who make poor choices, we like to think “Well, that’s what you get.” Our recourse to blame and smug satisfaction at the misfortune of others is arguably a self-soothing technique in response to evils. Evil makes the world seem like a bad place. But when we reframe evils as forms of justice, like in karma, then we can make the world seem better than it really is. So belief in free will could be motivated by an existential desire to avoid the conclusion that our world is far more chaotic and unjust than we want it to be.
Then there's the matter of credit. Successful people may be biased to attribute their success to their own free will rather than luck. But if there is no free will, then it's luck all the way down. Letting go of free will means letting go of all credit, all glory, all attribution to you. But the reverse of Point 2 applies here: you still get to behold the goodness of what you are (or the luckiness of what you are), and in that sense you can still retain a sense of reasonable pride. But even with that, there is still the much deeper humility that you had nothing to do with your success, you're just the lucky duck that got to hitch a ride on an organism that was set up nicely by fortunate circumstances.
So the person who thinks we can just dismiss views via psychoanalysis will have to dismiss the free will view by these psychoanalyses. Obviously, that’s not what we should do. What we should do is analyze the arguments for and against competing views and come to a judgment.
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