First, as a pre-amble, given your apparent grounding in ideas of philosophical naturalism (as opposed to mere "atheism", or disbelief in gods, which is a frequent conclusion that naturalists come to):
[...] I have hope that technology and the economies of scale will change the opportunities problem and tap into the "wisdom of crowds" that emerges in human nature as in the rest of nature. Maybe technology is adding to the complexity thereby by giving us more free will.
It's not clear what precisely you are identifying as human nature, nor how this would help. As a naturalist, it is clear that humans in principle have some "nature", though my definition is both tautologous and impossible to quantify in practise; no more or less than the range of behaviour that you should expect in any given situation, ranging over all possible people and all possible situations. The range of behaviour may be wide, and vary quite substantially from whichever 'average' you might like to propose, or even any way of determining an 'average' or a deviation from it, that you might propose. Indeed, the ability to vary from the average is exactly what many people would like to talk about when they consider freedom of choice. To the extent that "human nature" means anything at all, it is anathema to freedom of choice.
Nor does technology help; it only changes the distribution of our behaviour away from what it would be without our sharp and/or shiny tools, so that restricting to situations in which we have various technology available to us distorts the very idea of what "human nature" means as a phrase. Even if you want to talk about technology giving us the freedom to accomplish certain things that people want instead of a behaviouristic approach of observing what people do (in order to distinguish 'will' from 'choice'), the things that we want are often shaped by what we imagine possible. Few people wanted to play video games before they were invented, with the possible exception of the first video game authors.
Inasmuch as you're concerned with medical or environmental causes of criminal behaviour, what you're considering is not freedom of choice, but to be free of things that drive us to act in socially unacceptable ways. What you're envisioning is a (relatively mild) normative force on human behaviour which prevents us from acting in a way that will cause us strongly negative social consequences. Perhaps technology will make this possible; certainly forms of mass-media, such as television and centrally distributed platforms for purchasing music and video, do have a tendancy to promote convergence of behaviours and ideas. But it is not clear that we can eradicate all causes of social disruption which could be attributed to unfortunate environmental or biological influences, while adopting a typical humanist platform of promoting self-realisation and intellectual development.
As to your question:
How can you blame someone for how things have turned out for them [?] Let alone ask someone choose to change, unless they have adequate brain plasticity or opportunities/access to information/support [...] It's almost as though you have to acknowledge the existence of a "soul" or a permanent consciousness (or subcouncious) which "knows better" that guides you as a moral person. [...] We need faith in something or we start to get depressed and stagnate. Even if that's in the illusion of choice and free will.
If you abandon the notion of choice, you must also abandon the notion of blame.
If you disbelieve in choice, it is not clear what "blame" could mean, beyond mere attributing of causal agency. If someone kills a child because they had a brain tumour, which gives them voices in their head which they are compelled to obey, this does not change the fact that this quite disturbed person was the proximal cause of the death of the child. The killing of people — children especially — is socially prohibited (which is in one sense an understatement, but at the same time is precisely what is at issue when we speak of law). So we must raise the question of how to react to the killing.
Much of what is socially unacceptable, is unacceptable because it is greatly disruptive to society. It is harder to maintain a stable society with a large murder rate, for example. It seems to me that we have agreed to laws in which murder has strong punishments, and to a society which is structured so that the chances of being prosecuted for murder is quite high if you perform the act, because we view the stability that such a society brings as a worth-while trade-off for this limitation on behaviour. Other prohibitions, such as theft, exist for similar reasons; and still other laws or social customs exist merely as conventions in order to put boundaries on the range of peoples behaviour — in order to make people more predictable, and interaction with other people more tractable as a result of that range of predictability.
People who are for whatever reason inclined to violate these laws or conventions put themselves, to one extent or another, outside of the vaguely collective agreements of society. At the least, they may be a source of minor controversy, which can be good for a society; but in the case of someone who kills others in society, whether out of a sort of existentialist lust to realise their freedom of choice (as in Camus' The Stranger) or for medical reasons outside of their control, they are from a straightforwardly causative perspective a danger to society; and so we must react to maintain the stability, if we find the compromises of society preferable to its limitations.
What differs, if you have a concept of "blame" or not, is how you react. If you have a concept of "blame", because you think that the tumour-suffering person could always have chosen not to kill anyone, then you punish them to satisfy your affronted sense of justice. But the very emotion of righteous indignation is likely to be an animal response, preferentially selected for the effect that it produces of preventing people from passively accepting whatever harm might befall them; it is a clumsy and inefficient judge of how best to react to achieve a more compassionate response. Better still would be to simply remove whatever caused the violent behaviour, and forego the inefficient decision procedure of deciding whether to "blame" them.
Of course, this very thought process of medically removing the causes of violent behaviour is exactly what is portrayed in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, in the forms of electroshock therapy, medication, and finally lobotomization. This illustrates the importance — and the peril — of allowing a society to judge what is a sufficiently "disruptive" behaviour to require medical treatment, what is a reasonably likely medical cause for the behaviour, and what is a reasonable treatment for that behaviour. Any heavily simplified model for disruptive behaviour may be as oppressive, or more so, than the marginal behaviours that it was devised to treat. Given people's strong preference for very simple world-models — especially when they operate as part of a committee, and in the name of an abstract ideal such as "justice" or "morality" — this is a danger not to be neglected.
