For example, the child in the restaurant wants to order ice cream for lunch, but his mother does not allow it. Instead, she chooses what her child will have for lunch. The child is not free to make that choice for himself.
Wording and surface appearance don't necessarily represent how the world works.
Well, if we see something, and we accurately describe what we see, then that usually tells us what is actually happening. For example, we see people in the restaurant choosing from the menu what they will order for dinner. We know that free will is when someone decides for themselves what they will do while free of coercion and undue influence, so we say that the people in the restaurant are placing orders that they chose of their own free will.
However, the child is not free to choose for himself what he will have for dinner. He wants ice cream for dinner. So his mother knows that he is too young to make that choice for himself, and she orders an appropriate meal for him. His mother controls that choice. He is not allowed to make that choice for himself.
If the world is deterministic, just as you have defined determinism, whatever the mother and the child does has no alternatives. There was never a possibility of them doing anything other than what must happen, precisely as determined, no deviation.
The mother was able to order anything she wanted from the restaurant menu, for herself and for her child. Every item on the menu was a real possibility. Determinism simply asserts that only two of those possibilities, one for herself and one for her child, would become the actual dinners that she would order.
It's not a matter of freely chosen actions or free will.
Of course it was a matter of freely chosen actions. No one was forcing the mother to choose one thing rather than another. She made that choice for herself, according to her own dietary goals for herself and the child. It was clearly a choice of her own free will, causally determined by her own goals and her own reasons. But her child, who wanted nothing but ice cream for dinner, was not allowed to make that choice for himself. Being a child, his will was subject to her will, and was not free.
And it was also a matter of causal determinism. She had acquired those dietary goals and reasons through her own past experiences, which would likely include what she learned as a child from her own parents, anything she was taught in school, perhaps books she had read, discussions with her doctor and the pediatrician, etc. Our goals and reasons are deterministically caused by prior events.
We have both. We have determinism and we have free will, both exhibited within the same event of choosing from the menu what we will order for dinner.
The same is true of free will in legal matters. In a court of law, a person is not held responsible if they were forced to participate in a crime against their will, or if their crime was caused by something that was beyond their control, such as a significant mental illness that subjected them to hallucinations and delusions, or impaired their ability to reason, or that subjected them to an irresistible impulse. These will be matters of hard evidence, legal precedents, and expert testimony.
Anyone with a functional brain and an understanding of the law understands the consequences of breaking the law.
Ah, yes. Those consequences are what society believes the person justly deserves ("basic deserts") for their harmful actions. Ideally, society would believe that the offender also justly deserves an opportunity to change themselves through rehabilitation.
Society works on rationality. The brain is a rational system, an information processor. Determinism entails what happens according to an interaction of inputs - the law of the land and the penalties for not complying - in relation to the state that acquires and processes this information.
Yes. Rationality is a deterministic causal mechanism. In the same way that we think and choose and plan how to build a house, we also think and choose and plan how we will cope with the practical issue of criminal behavior. And the robber thinks and chooses and plans how to commit the robbery. The deterministic behavior of choosing for ourselves what we will is also called "free will" when there is no coercion or other types of undue influence (for example: hypnosis, significant mental illness, authoritative command as between parent and child, or commander and soldier, etc.).
Free will is a deterministic process. It happens through good ol' reliable cause and effect (also known as "causal necessity").
The rational thing to do is comply for safety reasons, regardless of the penalties. Some folk have no regard for the law or the penalties...perhaps considering themselves too clever to get caught.
Well, that's the thing about rational thought. Different people, with different prior life experiences, may have different goals and reasons than we do.
Each according to their state, condition and proclivities, be it rational or irrational.
Yes. The irony is that irrational choices are also produced rationally, but reliably produced using bad information and/or bad logic.
Nothing to do with free will.
Every choice that a person or a society makes for itself while free of coercion and undue influence is,
by definition, free will. What we need to keep straight is that free will is not freedom from causal necessity, but only freedom from coercion and other forms of undue influence. Nothing more and nothing less.
Causal necessity, itself, is neither coercive nor undue. Only specific causes are coercive, like the guy holding a gun to our head. Only specific causes are undue influences, influences so strong that they remove our normal control of our choices. So, causal determinism itself does not violate a person's free will. Only specific causes can do that.
Free will is a deterministic event within a world of deterministic events. Whenever we make a choice for ourselves of our own free will, it will be causally necessary from any prior point in time that we would be doing exactly that, and nothing else, at that new point in time.
