> I don't really see how we can have both manslaughter and murder, without free will. What extra thing did the angry guy do? He didn't make a choice, because (

> I don't really see how we can have both manslaughter and murder, without free will. What extra thing did the angry guy do? He didn't make a choice, because (for the sake of argument) he has no free will. What is the characteristic that makes what he did worse? The cost to society is the same. That doesn't require the concept of free will. Because for manslaughter and murder the reasons are different for the death. One is deliberate, one isn't. > It seems like, punishment would need to be interpreted purely as societal cost. So you tally up the wreckage from the car accident example above, say $25,000 and 2 lives. You would also want to calculate predicted future costs from that person, mainly from the point of view of harm to other people. If someone like them is likely to kill on average one or more people in the rest of their life then they aren't going to be allowed to interact with general society again. This doesn't need the concept of free will to implement. It only needs a sufficiently sophisticated way of determining of what harm a person like them will likely cause. This is in addition to the harm they have already caused, so there is no reason for someone to become a one time killer. And yes, getting the predictions right may be really tricky, and the way the courts currently sentence people may be a good as or better than trying to predict what people do on average. But the way courts sentence at the moment doesn't require the concept of free will anyway, because people do what they do because of reasons, human reasons, and they can differentiate there.