What would you think if I said there were indications that most conscious decision making isn't fully conscious at all? That, to a degree, free will is an illusory shadow of subconscious processes and that by the time you choose something, you've really already chosen it? And that genetics, prenatal development, and cultural influences all have a great say in those subconscious processes?
For example, if a child becoming a very aggressive person were totally predictable based on behavioral characteristics of the biological parents, would that matter in this discussion?
I know this is a departure from the way we typically like to think about ourselves, but there is actually some good evidence to indicate that we may not have as much control as we think.
Not necessarily fixing those who are caught, but pour encourager les autres. There are no morals here, since we are all just machines, and we're just trying to get the machines to do what we want.
Okay, sure. We have evidence that certain behaviors are predictable, but that doesn't eliminate free will entirely, it just limits it.
It's also worth making a distinction between our subconscious and conscious choices, even if they are both more or less deterministic. At least we are aware of our conscious choices, and probably identify more strongly with them.
The original discussion was about when someone deserves credit for their actions. And if there are two poles of always and never, can we land somewhere in between? And where?
As a web developer with degrees in both math and programming, I sometimes find direct applications of math, such as backing off from updating something on the page exponentially when the user goes AFK, or more commonly, when working with visualizations (see d3.js). For the most part, my peers without much of a math background could solve the same problems in other ways. For more graphics-oriented stuff it gets a little harder but often a library plus a tutorial blog post gets the job done.
