If we care to look look to the example of JFK’s assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald. According to determinism, the condition of the universe one instant after the big bang sufficed to produce the death of JFK in November 1963. But this tells us nothing about what actually caused Kennedy’s death, or who bears responsibility for his assassination.
JFK could have been assassinated even if were other than what it was. The necessary preconditions of the assassination included things like “Lee Harvey Oswald was born” and “Oswald pulled the trigger of his gun” and so on, not the complete description of the microphysical properties of the universe one instant after the big bang.
This example allows us to see why the incompatibilist fear of determinism is misplaced: when we are interested in explaining why something happened, or in figuring out who bears responsibility for it, we are primarily interested in what is causally necessary, not what is causally sufficient.
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