If I'm being completely honest, I dont really believe we have free will. Or we do, but in an almost entirely meaningless way on a civilizational scale. While you might be able to make small choices, material conditions and the flow of history ultimately decide the course of your life. We're all just products of our environment which none of us can change on our own, and as much as we can change our environment as a collective is decided upon by current conditions which are determined by oast conditions, etc. Basically i think the entirity of history was determined at the big bang, and were all just along for the ride.
It doesn't matter - we have the illusion of free will at the very least, which is indistinguishable from actually having free will. So uh just keep doing whatever you were doing before I guess
One of the most interesting consequences of concluding that we don't have free will is that retributive justice becomes obviously pointless. If the public can be convinced that the primary cause of socially undesirable behavior is the influencing environment, then we get a lot more support for rehabilitative justice and social justice.
Oh I thought we were talking about individual imperatives and not societal perceptions, I suppose you're right
Well, for individual perspectives, the idea that I have no free will still affect how I act by abandoning attempts to "just do" hard things, and prioritise changing the influential environment, instead. Don't keep candy in your house because you'll just eat it, stuff like that.
It doesn't make it pointless. Pushing criminals is de facto changing the environment and can influence what other people do even if they don't have free will.
It's true in theory that punishment for crime affects the environment to some degree, but all studies on the subject show that in practice it has a negligible-to-zero effect on whether people commit crimes.
Really? I always hear people say that probability of the punishment has more effect than its severity.
Interesting, hadn't heard this angle before. I can find a paper theorising via Nash game theory that this should have an effect, but didn't find any studies about this using real-world data. Didn't look too hard, though.