Posts by HORansome
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to Keir Leslie,
I think you can say that unjust laws are not laws. And unjust verdicts are, arguably, not verdicts!
Well, good luck finding a society, whose rule of law agrees with your definitions, to live in , then.
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to Keir Leslie,
in many ways are not law at all, in the sense that they don't have the classic lawlike attributes of (a) being followed or (b) being enforced.
Issues to do with the legitimacy of laws is a separate issue from the legitimacy of a judicial system and the verdicts its renders; you can accept that some set of laws are unjust but still accept that if someone is convicted of them, they are guilty (in the legal sense).
Legitimacy in law is super important, and your proposal just doesn't have an explanation for what legitimacy is other than a circular `what the courts do', which is rather unsatisfying.
Given that my construal is that of the status quo and you haven't come up with a counter proposal, what is the definition you think we should be operating under?
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to Keith Hunter,
Oh, I know things about the Watson case. I just don't agree with your interpretation of the evidence (i.e. I don't think the particular candidate explanatory hypothesis you infer from the body of evidence as a whole is the best explanation of the event in question). That doesn't mean I'm committed to the Crown case but I'm not convinced by the argument you present in "Trial by Trickery."
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to Keir Leslie,
It is very attractive to head towards a totally pragmatic definition of guilt but the subsequent legal system lacks any legitimacy.
That's only the case if you think that the different types of guilt are, in essence, the same thing, but the system we are under the jurisdiction of allows that there are different types of guilt, thus leading to weird situations where you can be legally guilty of a crime (say, internet piracy) and yet have an ethical argument which says that you are not guilty in any moral sense. You can also be found not guilty in a legal sense for something you did actually do (because, say, the Crown failed to prove you did it beyond reasonable doubt). You can say "It lacks legitimacy" to your heart's content, but we're dealing here with a legal, stipulative definition of guilt; it's legitimate because that is how the government and the judiciary of the day define it.
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to 3410,
We're really not that far apart on this; I just don't think it's right to talk about "moral" guilt when you're simply discussing whether or not you committed an act. It's a matter of fact; did eat the guavas = guilty of eating the guavas, did not eat the guavas = not guilty...
But not all acts have an attendant guilt state. I'm not guilty of sitting here typing (which is an act I am currently committing). I can see where you are going with this, but I think this unrestricted notion of "guilt" is too broad to be useful.
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to 3410,
I'm not sure what "guilty in a factual sense" means. I can understand what legal guilt is and moral guilt, but factual?" What fact am I guilty with respect to?
There's no legal sense of guilt in the example I gave (unless there is some rule about leaving some guavas, et al, for the flatmates) but I may well have transgressed some social norm, which means I'm guilty of being a bad flatmate. However, the latter is no crime, but it might well be construed as bad behaviour and thus, if not immoral, morally suspect.
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to Keir Leslie,
But when we get back to earth, there is a crisis of legitimacy in a legal system where legal guilt doesn't correspond to actual guilt.
Well, no. This is precisely why we have a system of "Innocent until proven guilty" (not all jurisdictions are similar); we have chosen a system whereby the prosecution has the burden of proof, knowing full well that sometimes people who are guilty (say, in a moral sense) of some activity will not be found to be guilty in a legal sense and (we should hope in very few cases) sometimes people who are not guilty in, say, a moral sense might be found to be guilty in some legal sense. These are the tradeoffs we have elected to have in our judicial system.
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to Keir Leslie,
(By the way, while the `what counts as proven guilty is determined by the courts’ is a very attractive statement, the obvious follow on is that guilt is a purely formal term with no connection to any state of affairs except the judicial, a conclusion that we can hardly countenance.)
Why can't we countenance it? Surely, in the judicial system, guilt is merely having been found guilty of a crime? Sure, there are other types of guilt; I might feel guilty about eating all the guavas and leaving none for my flatmates, but that's moral guilt and, unless eating all the guavas and leaving none for my flatmates is a crime, I'm only guilty in a moral rather than legal sense.
Long story short: It's actually very useful to distinguish between guilt in the judicial sense and guilt in, say, the moral sense. Whatever we think about the Bain retrial verdict, he has been found "Not guilty." Lots of people think he is guilty, but, legally speaking, he is not guilty.
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to Ross Francis,
Ross:
I was talking about the stipulative nature of how we define the burden of proof in a legal setting (and how the burden of proof shifts post trial). I was not saying the system is perfect.
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to Stewart,
My mother considers this to the chief difference between American vs. British cop shows; in American cop shows the detectives signal out the main suspect and the suspect usually turn out to have committed the crime. In British cop shows the detectives signal out the main suspect who ends up not being the real perpetrator.