Libertarian free will doesn’t exist. To anyone that believes in physicalism and causal determinism, this claim is the standard, philosophically populist take.

Even in the case that you don’t buy determinism and believe in quantum entropy as sufficient evidence against it, random will is still no free will. If you believe in immaterial objects of influence like souls and gods, you still don’t have free will. Furthermore, where does their will come from? Truly, it’s almost free will as a concept cannot exist at all, because where would it come from except your environment, genetics, and entropy? You have no free will.

Now what does this mean for the real world given you’re one of few that realizes it?

1. Pre-Note: it’s still the case that we all have goals and aspirations and a general want for more net wellbeing for ourselves and our kin. The absence of free will is not in contradiction with these goals and doesn’t at all imply we should just lay in our beds because nothing matters. That’d be nihilism.

2. The concept of blame doesn’t make sense when everyone is just a helpless victim to their unique conditions. The concept of reward cannot either. But we still probably want both things because they motivate good behaviour and minimize less desirable ones in everyone.

3. That said, blame toward strangers you have no power to influence and will never engage with again does not. If you’re in traffic and a reckless driver overtakes you, letting your arteries fuel with adrenaline and cursing in your seat is instinctual, but absolutely irrational.

4. Everyone is innocent. Yet we cannot treat them as such. Until we have pills that instantly make everyone in jail apologetic, well-functioning members of society, we still need our - what are now in actuality cruel and at some level, unjust - institutions of punishment. There’s still good work to be done here though, because we can imagine intermediary solutions where the public (and therefore potential future criminals) are led to believe of the existence of punishment systems while actual captives are somehow secretly let go.

5. If we did convince everyone of the truth, it’s reasonable to assume that many would naively take it to mean that nihilism is the right way. It’s one of those useful lies like believing you have more control over your future prospects than you really do. It may be untrue, but it’s persistence is the only way we can maximize the metrics we want to promote.

I can go longer but here’s my meta point: ultimately there is little we ought to change societally even when we know of the absence of free will because the belief in it is one of the strongest guiding forces of good behaviour in the world. Personally, it can make you more zen and that can be a good thing. Though it is my intuition that a 100% of everyone that’s convinced by the argument doesn’t truly believe it in all their day to day actions because of how instinct-driven we really are.