| >An asteroid hitting Earth is predetermined by early stages of universe too. Is the collision just correlated with dinosaurs extinction, or was it the cause? It was the cause but it was predetermined itself. Note that the free will of the dinosaurs or the asteroid doesn't enter the picture at all here. Similarly, and this is the argument, in the drop-in-crime case, our "commitment to punish certain behavior" is not any more of a commitment than the rock was "committed" to extinguish the dinosaurs. >Why is it different when people are involved? It's not different physically. The actions can't be said to be decisions is all or to have caused a particular chain of events is all (that chain was the only possible one). >In the case of criminals and punishement assuming determinism - our brains deterministically evolved to deterministically respond to punishement by deterministically changing the behaviour when punished. The point is that they couldn't have evolved any other way, and the crime couldn't have been any less or more than what it is. So those measures can't be said to have dropped crime (since it could never be anything else). |
That's redefining words to the extreme.
A rock has dropped because of gravity and lack of support. It doesn't matter that in this universe with the starting conditions as they are - the rock had to drop. It still dropped.
Homo sapiens (or whatever ancestor it was when it happened) - evolved to punish crimes. It lowered the crime, or had other beneficial effects on the population, that's why it was preserved by the evolution. It doesn't matter that it couldn't evolve in any different way given the starting conditions of the universe. It still happened.