I'm afraid we have a conscience just to be better survivors.
Of course we now have cognitive capabilities and can decide what to do with ourselves. We're no longer tied to optimizing our fitness. We can decide that morality is important because we say it's important. So no reason to be scared.
Does that count as "free will?" Sounds like it to me, if I understand what you're saying here.
Conscious decision making does not equate to free will, because such decisions are made within a context created by the biological parameters I've already discussed. Battuta is referring to conscious decision making.
Free will is traditionally thought as the ability to make ANY decision from the available pool of limitless possibilities and attempt to carry it out. It has a quasi-religious connotation because it is frequently used as an excuse for why a deity of choice permits bad things to occur. Free will in this sense, however, does not exist. I could no more choose to go out and massacre the inhabitants of my neighborhood than I could cause my physical form to spontaneously manifest on the moon - I have a conscience, personal morality, ability to comprehend potential outcomes, and conscious decision making ability. While conscious decision making (and self-awareness) permit every person the illusion of free will, the gene-behaviour-environment interactions I discussed earlier limit the pool of available choices from infinite to a very narrow subset based upon who we have become as people through those interactions in our evolutionary ancestry and our personal development from conception.
Thus, the illusion - "I could, but I won't because." The fact that humans are self-aware makes us think we aren't constrained in our behaviour, but the truth is that we are - morality and a conscience are two of the ways biology successfully masks our inability to choose from the infinite pool. We have evolved those two mental characteristics over time to allow us to function as a species with collective societies. What our social morality/conscience actually says to each individual is of comparatively little importance compared to the end product of formation of groups with similar morality. This is why that, among groups with a shared morality, individuals with different moral codes are often shunned, segregated, and in many societies outright killed - they challenge the social norms and cooperation of the group. That's also part of the reason why it is so difficult to force change in particular behaviours among religious groups (see: treatment of women in fundamentalist Islamic/Christian/Jewish cultures).
