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TheOtherDave comments on Crime and punishment - Less Wrong
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Let's imagine that your city hires Robocop, who (fortunately) has a publicly readable source code in this hypothetical, and is programmed to shoot anyone who commits a violent crime from this moment on.
An evil mastermind would immediately look up the source code, realize this, and put their criminal plans on hold until they've found a way to circumvent Robocop. They would be subjunctively deterred.
A regular hoodlum wouldn't realize that anything was different until they started seeing other criminals riddled with bullets. They would be causally deterred from committing crimes when they saw the punishment actually being meted out.
The point Silas is making is that, if all your city's criminals are of the first type, then Robocop will successfully deter crime even without actually shooting anybody.
And possibly without being able to shoot anybody.
That is, if there's a bug in Robocop's source code that in practice will cause it to never actually load its weapon, but the bug is subtle enough that even an evil mastermind won't notice it based on an evaluation of the source code, then the evil mastermind is deterred "subjunctively" while the regular hoodlum is altogether unaffected (though the evil mastermind presumably quickly updates on the existence of non-bullet-riddled criminals).
If all the city's criminals are evil masterminds, OTOH, they are all deterred.