Saul Smilansky, [is] a professor of philosophy at the University of Haifa in Israel, who believes the popular notion of free will is a mistake, [but that] although free will as conventionally defined is unreal, it’s crucial people go on believing otherwise ....“On the deepest level, if people really understood what’s going on...it’s just too frightening and difficult,” Smilansky said.Smilansky is right about the consequences of a deterministic view of human choice. Not only would it do away with the idea that humans deserve reward and punishment, it would also do away with the idea of moral guilt. It would also strip our species of any notion of human dignity, equality, or rights.
“For anyone who’s morally and emotionally deep, it’s really depressing and destructive. It would really threaten our sense of self, our sense of personal value. The truth is just too awful here.”
Here's Burkeman:
By far the most unsettling implication of the case against free will, for most who encounter it, is what it seems to say about morality: that nobody, ever, truly deserves reward or punishment for what they do, because what they do is the result of blind deterministic forces. “For the free will sceptic,” writes Gregg Caruso in his new book Just Deserts,...“it is never fair to treat anyone as morally responsible.”The preceding paragraph illustrates why so few philosophers believe we can live consistently as determinists. Caruso uses words like "unjustified" and "capricious," but if determinism is true there are no acts which are justified or unjustified, and there certainly is no caprice.
Were we to accept the full implications of that idea, the way we treat each other – and especially the way we treat criminals – might change beyond recognition.
For Caruso, who teaches philosophy at the State University of New York, what all this means is that retributive punishment – punishing a criminal because he deserves it, rather than to protect the public, or serve as a warning to others – can’t ever be justified....Retribution is central to all modern systems of criminal justice, yet ultimately, Caruso thinks, “it’s a moral injustice to hold someone responsible for actions that are beyond their control. It’s capricious.”
Everything happens as the inevitable consequence of the initial conditions of the Big Bang. To complain that an act is unjustified is meaningless and to allege that an act is capricious is to imply that it could have been otherwise than it was, which is nonsense if determinism is true.
Caruso commits the same inconsistency in the next section. Burkeman writes:
Caruso is an advocate of what he calls the “public health-quarantine” model of criminal justice, which would transform the institutions of punishment in a radically humane direction.But how, assuming the truth of determinism, can we speak of a "right" to do something and an "obligation" to do something else? These words are meaningless if there are no genuine choices. If at every given moment there's only one possible future how can people have a right or an obligation to do other than what they've been determined to do?
You could still restrain a murderer, on the same rationale that you can require someone infected by Ebola to observe a quarantine: to protect the public. But you’d have no right to make the experience any more unpleasant than was strictly necessary for public protection. And you would be obliged to release them as soon as they no longer posed a threat.
Like so many philosophical questions, the question of free will really comes down to the question of God. If one doesn't believe in God then it's indeed difficult to see how we could have free will even though we'd find it impossible to live consistently as a determinist.
But if God does exist then it's possible that He has endowed us with an immaterial self (mind or soul) not subject to physical law and out of which not only conscious experience but also genuinely free choices arise.
Put differently, if you believe that there are at least some moments in your life when you're genuinely free to choose between two alternatives, then to be consistent you should be a theist. If you are a naturalistic materialist then free will certainly would seem inexplicable, but if determinism is true why are the implications so disturbing and why can't we live consistently as determinists?
As Burkeman admits, he has to live as though determinism is false:
I’m certainly going to keep responding to others as though they had free will: if you injure me, or someone I love, I can guarantee I’m going to be furious, instead of smiling indulgently on the grounds that you had no option.Burkeman has much more to say about "Free will Skepticism" at the link. The article's a bit long, but worth reading in that it does a good job of presenting the determinist challenge to those who believe in libertarian free will.
In this experiential sense, free will just seems to be a given.