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I'm sure there's equivocation on "choice" here—people who believe in libertarian free will usually have a theory of choice which I find bizarre and often incoherent. I'm not certain to what extent it's clockwork-like vs. is determined by continuous divine input, but I'll allow it for now. I don't think something clockwork-like, as you put it, is incompatible with choices. When you decide to do something, you think it through, and make decisions, with such factors influencing it as your own character and whatever circumstances are happening at the moment. You are clearly deliberating in such a way that your actions are a product of who you are, and it being deterministic doesn't change that—none of this requires things happening beyond ordinary causality. When someone is being judged, I don't think it's a problem that there's some sense in which it couldn't have happened in any other way—they still made wrong decisions and acted wickedly. Judgment was earned. Just because their decisions were part of a divine plan does not mean that they couldn't be evil in themselves. To quote Joseph, in Genesis 50:20, "As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today."
It seems like we're at an impasse, because to me freedom of choice is a hard requirement for moral culpability. This is a moral axiom as far as I'm concerned, so we probably simply have to agree to disagree.
What, exactly, is freedom of choice?
Moral culpability in a deterministic setting seems reasonable enough to me—choices are outflows from who I am and my character, so it's not at all surprising that we should consider me culpable and guilty for doing bad acts. They're an expression of my own bad self. I don't see why any nondeterminism would be involved there—insofar as it is, my choices would then be less reflective of who I am, and so would seem to be less tied to me and I should be less culpable for them. So determinism seems more naturally to fit with moral responsability to me.
In any case, as I started this comment, what is freedom of choice?
You spoke earlier of incoherence, but this seems to me to be completely incoherent. How on earth can there be moral culpability for something which you did not have any say in? If indeed the choices you made were set in stone from the moment of your birth (by your genes, by the environment you were raised in, and so on) - there can be no possible moral culpability. You have not, in that event, done anything to be culpable for! The very idea of deterministic outcomes, but with moral culpability for your choices (which they really weren't, but simply the inevitable result of prior circumstance) is incoherent in my opinion.
I quite honestly have no idea what you are driving at nor how to answer your question. The matter is self-evident, it requires no explanation (nor could I provide one without going in circles, because it is so fundamental).
But you do have a say in it. You have moral culpability precisely because you have a say in it. I don't understand why the fact that you are shaped by influences would have any effect on the fact that your choices are very much the product of you, as you, whether deliberately or impulsively, took action by your own will.
Okay, if you can't define it, I'll just have to ask questions until it's clearer. Do you believe choices are based on things? That is, are they arbitrary, not based on anything, or are they based on your own state? (Or is there some tertium quid which you can describe?)
I think that's perfectly reasonable, but as I said that isn't how I understand the idea of determinism. I don't think anyone, even the staunchest of free will advocates, believes that outside influences don't have a significant weight in the choices you make. But again, as I understand it determinism is saying that those are the only thing that matter, and that one's course is set in stone from the moment their life begins (with no actual choice to be made). And indeed that makes sense with respect to the name, because if the individual has any agency at all then the outcome is not deterministic.
I believe that one's choices are heavily influenced by the state one is in, but at the end of the day we still have free choice. So for example, I struggle to not be lazy. This is no doubt the result of many factors (my genes, perhaps something my parents did, years of ingrained habits). It's very likely that I'll make the lazy choice in any given situation. But in the end, I do have a choice, and ultimately bear the responsibility no matter what is tipping my mental scales.
Again, I'll affirm that we choose stuff, though I'm sure we disagree on what exactly "choose" means—to me deliberation between choices and, based upon that deliberation, coming to have in your will definitive intent would certainly suffice for choice, but you don't think it so, evidently. I'd accordingly affirm that we have plenty of agency, we choose to do stuff all the time, and our actions obviously bear the imprint of our own character and agency—it's not like they're happening apart from and abstracted away from us.
But I fundamentally don't see things like "I'm habitually lazy" as some outside factor in my decision-making. It's something inside, a part of you, and your doing things accordingly is a natural outflow of you.
So, perhaps another question: can choices be accurately be described, in your view, as the product of a mixture of a determined part, including all the reasons motivating, your character, the circumstances, etc, combined with an indeterminate, arbitrary part? Perhaps, could we express it as a random number generator, with the choose/choose otherwise set at some threshold, not necessarily 50% depending on the other factors?
Because that seems to me something like what you're describing, and that isn't at all like what I'd want choices to be like. I want to be the doer, and I'm a thing, with real states and properties, not something arbitrary. Causelessness seems to subtract agency, to me.
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