[foldr]

>From societies perspective there is no difference between someone with free will choosing bad (illegal) decisions from a bad entity programmed to make bad decisions.

Says who? Those strike me as different. Society could certainly choose to recognize them as different.

>Intent is exactly what is fair to punish someone for. What can be fairer?

It isn't fair if people have no control over their intentions, which they don't if they don't have free will.

[UnFleshedOne]

An entity making bad decisions because its whole history and current environment made it that way (no free will) and an entity making identical decisions because it has an out-of-universe-outside-of-physics control unit that merely takes history and current environment into consideration (free will) while making those decisions -- are identical when viewed as a black box from outside.

In fact if you start asking questions on what makes the out-of-universe control unit lean this way or that, you can arrive at it either having that inherent property (it just choses right more often than left) or it is a result of some outside influence. And we are at the square one again.

It's p-zombies all the way down.

From society perspective the goal is to minimize or encourage certain behaviors. The only lever available in either scenario is to change the history (by reducing harmful events in general for example) and current environment (by promising punishment or reward and affecting risk assessment for example).

Whether you have a free will or not, the only way to influence your decisions is by affecting your history and current environment. Assigning blame and holding people responsible is a lever that works the same. Doesn't mean you can't look at exactly how effective it is comparing to other methods though.

[foldr]

Right, but we don't actually view people as block boxes, and neither does 'society', as far as I can see. We care about whether or not someone freely chose to do what they did.

[tjoff]

We do? We might pretend we would like to. But we can't even distinguish whether a decision was made with free will or not and we don't even attempt to try and find out.