I think the evolutionary origin of ideas of "deserving punishment" is basically a need to incentivise others not to defect against you, but the actual intuition in most people's heads is just to assign utility to the suffering of "bad people" in some proportion with how bad whatever they've done is. Also the concept of free will as most people use it is pretty confused and gives confusing results if you have it interact with other concepts like "incentives".
but the actual intuition in most people's heads is just to assign utility to the suffering of "bad people" in some proportion with how bad whatever they've done is.
Of course, for the incentives to work you need a precommitment to punish, but once the person has defected, that's done and punishing him no longer benefits you. Hence the requirement to assign utility to the suffering of bad people.
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