[MrScruff]

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.

[tchaffee]

That does ignore a lot of the important factors but it's a useful analogy.