Wow - is this a loaded statement. The instinctive empathy and social relations are built in by evolution.
No argument there.
Pairing that with a dismissive “nothing more” is where it gets weird.
Are we discussing Plato’s ideal “Determinism” (like his ideal chair) as if that is a real thing?
We are real meat machines. With real built-in instincts coupled with emotions. From the point of birth, the environment must take over. For example - it is necessary to provide human contact during a critical period to activate the empathy instinct. There are children that were abandoned to an orphanage that never got this and they are very broken people without empathy.
The installation of moral values that engage and shape how our instincts are expressed is part of the programming that is usually accomplished by “parenting.” Society provides certain sticks and carrots to supplement and shape this training.
There is nothing metaphysical about any of this.
Good and evil are relative and somewhat flexible across situations and societies. Thou shall not kill - unless it’s someone from a different tribe that we have issues with.
There are broken people - I define that as people that have instincts that are outside of what can be trained to acceptable behavior. This is a combination effort - weak instinct or insufficient training has about the same outcome.
The social construct of punishment serves as part of this training signal. The social construct of imprisonment or execution serves to remove incompatible people from the social environment and allow the rest of society to function. Sometimes these things are combined.
This goes well beyond simple “fairness and honest trading between hominids” and is an expression of our nature as social animals. Casually dismissing the guiding nature of societal “stick and carrots” misses the useful purpose they serve in shaping behavior. It’s not about “feeling good” - it’s about preventing rogue humans from disrupting the tribe.
Some societies attempt to repair defective training (rehabilitation) and the success or failure of that effort goes back to my assertion that some training has to be applied during a critical period and if you miss that window it is very hard to be successful.
Considering all of this - the “stick and carrot” are part of the instilling compatible behavior and the judgment of free will is the exercise of this training in whatever situation arises. Selecting actions that are compatible with the current set of compatible behaviors is considered “good” and selection of behaviors that are not is considered “bad.”
Example: I think that by any measure Mark Twain was a good person. His use of certain words was “good” in the time he lived and “bad” by today’s standards. Part of the issue with this is that his works are used as habituation with examples of good behavior and the fact that it contains exemplars of bad behavior is problematic.
Being a meat machine that is programmed by outside forces does not change the fact that this agent is free to apply this training in what may be surprising ways. Trying to freight this with more is pointless.
A comment I posted earlier seems appropriate here: