Moral Agency and Mens Rea

A controversy which my research into the belief-causality postulate has thrown up is that it implies determinism, psychological indeterminacy, doubt on moral agency (i.e. a person’s capability of acting with reference to right and wrong), and the legal doctrine of Mens rea (Guilty Mind) are not in the control of any individual as there is no free-will.

 

Primarily the doctrine of the guilty mind states that a person is legally responsible for what they do as long as they should know what they are doing, and their choices are deliberate (Martin & Law, 2009). Where mens rea is not required, the offence is one of strict liability (i.e. offences that are primarily regulatory aimed at businesses in relation to health and safety, where proof is through the action rather than the intent). This all assumes, of course, that the conscious mind is guiding us.

The law, once again, determines the supposed tangibility of how our perceptions are led into a collective notion of what we otherwise accepted as social-norms and societal realities, even should these be contrary to both neurological findings and philosophical musings. Nevertheless, as prosaic as they may be, these societal norms represent the proverbial wheel that we fear to reinvent, even when the wheel we have been using all these years happens to have four equal straight sides and four right angles.  As such, although scientifically invalid, this presents itself as the courtroom conventions that we must reluctantly accept as the premise for the controlling mind of a business and for use within accident causation models.

However, this acceptance does not negate the premise or relevance of my research, not least in that it potential furthers our understanding of causality, regardless of whether this is the received principle of the law or not.

An example of this is the verisimilitude of how the law would define probability, based more upon arguments adduced on the appearance of truth, in contrast to the scientific definition of probability, based upon a measuring empirical evidence, which is arrived at from inductive reasoning and statistical inference (Hacking, 2006). Both are distinctly valid, but only one would be used as a means of enforcement. 

Andrew Böber MSc CMIOSH FRSPH FRGS

Field Researcher

References:

- Hacking, I. (2006). The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-68557-3

- Martin, E.A. (ed).; Law, J. (ed). (2009). Oxford Dictionary of Law. 7th Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 

Reflections of a geographical past...of sorts

Since leaving the world of international conservation and living collections, I get very little front-line experience with fieldwork, more so as most of my own research is focused on a niche of human geography.  Naturally, when I was doing an advisory stint in Further Education I gave guidance on the Duke of Edinburgh activities, but it hardly compares .

Nowadays it is more just the occasional advice to some folk who are taking adventurous holidays to the parts of the world where you could either catch or tropical infection and have a part of your body removed by something sharp, or just have a part of your body removed by someone carrying something sharp as you happened to look at them in the wrong way. Of course, it is always difficult to explain how what the right way is to look at someone carrying something sharp who’s happy to remove bits of other peoples bodies with it, and a person is almost certainly have a better understanding of these random psychotic acts after they have come face-to-face with one or two incidents. Should they retain all their face following these incidents, then I would always recommend that these are the very fieldworkers to listen to careful, so long as you still have you ears and wish to keep them.

In some ways I take solace in no longer having to project manage issues that arise out of civil unrest, sexual assault, geophysical hazard and the array of other themes that make international fieldwork so fraught - not least dealing with the terribly naïve short-sighted tendencies of dreadfully nice well-educated middle-class academics whose unique cognitive defects have made them congenitally unable to understand the concept ‘acceptable risk’, often putting them not so much close to the cliff edge but completely over it. Given that many of the fieldworkers were zoologists, it often seemed inappropriate to put in sufficient control measures given that it would be construe as counterproductive to the process of natural selection. This was one such point they would earnestly approve of, which if anything further demonstrates their complete inability to understand acceptable risk. 

Still, being part of a team delivering a première international sports event, with one of the of the world highest number of outside broadcast operations, and catering to deal with over 500,000 during it, quite aside from the year round construction works, brings its own challenges and demands, but  thankfully none of these require me having to spend six months of the year dealing with variety of fungal infections on my body thanks to humidity and lack of clean clothes. As a colleague pointed out to me recently, whilst fungal infections make great talking points at pool parties and bring one closer to like minded people they make intimate relationships more problematic.

Andrew Böber MSc CMIOSH FRSPH FRGS

Field Researcher