We are stuck fighting over the definitions of words. And I kind of lost sight of the initial issue. Even if everything is deterministic, human society can only

We are stuck fighting over the definitions of words. And I kind of lost sight of the initial issue. Even if everything is deterministic, human society can only function successfully with the illusion of free will. If we admit nobody can be blamed for their actions, we can't punish them and thus the incentives not to do bad things disappear and the whole shebang collapses. If you kill people, we will lock you up, because we think killing people is bad and we want to prevent you from doing it again. You could just implement and enforce [1] that rule, period. Doesn't even sound unreasonable to me, not even without further elaboration. So when you are saying If we admit nobody can be blamed for their actions, we can't punish them [...] then this can at most mean that we can not punish them with a reasonable justification, we obviously can just punish them. One thing another comment reminded me of is that we are no longer punishing people for what they did, at least not in the sense of some kind of revenge. Anyway, if free will or blame or whatever plays any role, then only for building a reasonable justification for our rules. [1] Ignoring for the moment that you could not actually decide to implement or enforce a rule like that in a deterministic universe - it would either appear out of the previous state at some time or not and enforcement would happen or not.