The major impact of the selection from Dennett is to suggest that we humans are limited and fallible in our decisions, but can be help responsible for them nonetheless.  On the one hand we are neither angels nor the sort of saints which tradition said were, by God's grace, unable to sin.  So a Kantian morality, which says we must act as though we had free will, and use it to follow certain absolute moral rules, is unrealistic.  On the other hand, we recognize a need to put in prison people who in some sense have a diminished capacity to choose the good instead of the criminal.  One could argue that it is not fair to punish with prison precisely those who have the lesser capacity to choose to do good.  Yet we must do it anyway; we must hold one another responsible for our actions even if we do not have much by way of "free will," because that is the only way to protect one another from further harm.

      Barnes tried to push this issue further by asking which of the two following goals is more important.  

• 1) To save the idea of free will in order to save the notion of human dignity and avoid a reductionistic interpretation of us humans as "organic robots" in Dennett's phrase.   Barnes should have followed the reading guide, however, and described #1 as this:  to save the idea of free will in order to be able to declare that we or others are individually guilty or innocent.  What both of these #1's have in common is that they are concerned with the individual's status or state.  Compare that will 
• 2) To figure out why we humans make the choices we make so that we can diminish the number of choices that do great harm to one another.