As I mentioned in another reply, I agree with that wholeheartedly. That factor of punishment is called deterrence.
I am in favor of punishment for deterrence, denunciation and incapacitation. I am not in favor of punishment for retaliation (punitive justice) or rehabilitation (restorative justice).
If you don't have free will then how would something discourage you from doing something that is already determined you will do? That doesn't make any sense.
Not the commenter you're replying to, and I'm sure you already realise this, but crime/punishment in a fully deterministic universe could be seen as a 'self correction' mechanism of the whole system.
One could imagine an impossibly vast cellular automata system which develops individual cellular 'agents'. Over time the agents develop some means of reproduction/death/reward system and become more and more complex. Then the agents that evolve with cooperative behaviours start to dominate. One might imagine that the system as a whole would also evolve these kind of 'self corrective' behaviours for anti-cooperative behaviours of the individual agents.
This is ignoring the whole philosophical ethics discussion and consciousness of course.
By that logic, a deterministic computer program wouldn’t need inputs.
What is being claimed by a deterministic world model is that the output (behavior and internal state change) of a human is a pure function of its current state and inputs. Then we try to give inputs that will lead to desired outputs.
The non-compatibilist view of free will is that it is not a pure function, namely that there is a third independent factor, the “free will”, that influences the behavior (and possibly the internal state). If that is the case, there may never be a way to choose inputs that lead to the desired outputs, because the free will could simply void their effect.
You can't try to give inputs that will lead to desired outputs if you have no free will. You can't try to do anything. You just do exactly what you're programed to do.
Even if you can't try, you are still providing inputs, and how you e.g. react to the actions of others will be input to their further actions. That your control over these actions is illusory does not mean the actions themselves do not exist.
If I tell someone not to do something again, then that is an input to their future states whether or not my decision to tell them that was freely chosen or not.
If you go into that situation with the belief that not having free will means that what you do does not matter, and your action as a result is to not tell them, then that will affect their future states too. And so whether or not you have a real, free choice, it is beneficial to act as if free will exist even if you see it as an illusion.
I strongly believe we have no free will. I still get up and work, and try to do as best I can. I believe those choices are not free, but they feel like choices, and they impact my life, so I am happy I act as if they are free.
And so I'll still talk about making choices and trying to do things because of that illusion even though I believe it's all a chain of cause and effect.
I consider the notion of free will absolute utter nonsense, but I still don't agree with this.
Determinism does not mean "irrespective of what else happens, X will happen". It means "because of what else happened, X will happen". You can't say ahead of time that X will happen irrespective whether between now and then something else occurs that might affect the next events, such as actions meant to discourage you. You can only make that determination knowing the full chain of events and the full state.
One of the main argument people use against determinism is this notion that X will happen irrespective of what else happens or what you choose to do. But this is nonsense. You can't say that e.g. whether you keep your job and get fired is already determined, so it makes no difference if you stop going to work. If you stop going work you'll eventually get fired, because your failure to go to work will form part of a chain of cause and effect. Determinism, or even a stochastic universe, without free will just means that you did not have a free choice in the decisions involved. But you still took an action, and that action determined the consequences.
A rejection of free will means we should look differently at the past, because it has moral implications; it does not mean we should stop making the best choices we can going forward, even if we believe those choices are illusory and deterministic.
You understood perfectly well what the last part you quoted meant given the part you cut off. You could put quotes around "choices" to make it clear if you like. The point remains.
