I regularly see on Reddit and recently around here too ideas like "there is no free will hence nobody deserves anything, good or bad, no merits etc." and I am puzzled by them, because to me it is so that merit or desert or even justice means roughly like incentives that happen to work. If a reward makes people behave the way I want them to, I call the reward merited or deserved. Basically a sound investment. "you deserve punishment" is nothing more than "I think punishing you will make you or others behave the way I want to". "this punishment is just" means "it works, and it is also not harsher than necessary" i.e. executing pickpockets would likely work but unnecessarily harsh. "you earned your wealth" largely means I don't think your behavior or other people's behavior would become more desirable to me if I took away your wealth and gave it to someone else.

Maybe I am overly cynical as my account does not have an ethical aspect. I think it is rather than other people expect cosmic justice where there is none. People were said they merited and deserved medals for burning hostile soldiers to death alive with a flamethrower in war and I shouldn't be cynical about this?

OTOH almost everybody seems to disagree. People think deserving, earning, merit, justice, things like this have some "cosmic ethic/justice" to them and are very upset when they learn about determinism and figure it is not the case.

Likely I am missing something. What am I missing?