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.