Another Free-will poll, please bear with me!

[Angrboda]

I have a problem with people switching perspectives, and cherry picking too much. For example, if free will is not real, then responsibility is meaningless, and the idea of a legal justice system has to go out the window. But I've seen people argue in one thread that free will is an illusion, all is deterministic, and then on another thread say that a child rapist should be executed or something like that.

Because the only thing that can go out the window is the punitive side of the justice system - The rehabilitation procedure, the prevention and coercion needn't go away. I may not apply punitive/retributive measures to anyone, but I can still execute them if I believe they'll inevitably commit more crimes (or imprison them for life, whatever). Your argument would only apply if a justice system was based purely on bronze age divine retribution (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth) - Since it isn't (and it shouldn't be), acknowledging there is no free will does not mean we need to abolish the justice system because the purpose of justice is not to "hurt" people but to ensure peaceful living conditions for society and to give each person what's rightfully theirs.

I think an equivalent case can be made on the reward side of the equation. We reward good performance, in school, in the workplace, and in the home. People who perform well are rewarded with greater responsibility in the long run, so we start rewarding performance early to 'school' individuals both to desire to perform well and to work on the skills which lead to performing well. This is because we want the truly good performers to be promoted to situations of responsibility for the benefit of the whole. We would not want to promote someone who performs poorly on the job to a position of authority, as they would make worse decisions than someone who does perform well. Thus in the situation of 'rewards', we don't need to endorse a view of merit which depends on free will; we reward merit because doing so is fitting the right tool to the right job — we want performers in situations where performance matters. This view works in the case of promoting executives, and it also makes sense of schooling; we want to put those individuals who, through earning a degree, have the right skills (ability to perform) to handle the tasks of a job. We wouldn't reward a music major with an engineering job; schooling makes certain that people with the right necessary skills end up in the right positions of responsibility. It need not be based on a metaphysical view that good performers have 'earned' the right to a position of responsibility.