Online research in philosophy

In a rational system defences should interlock with the elements of the offence to ensure that conviction labels are differentiated according to the defendant’s degree of wrongdoing and culpability. The overall grading structure of criminal homicide, as represented in contemporary doctrine, goes some way to reflect this ethic. But the substance lacks precision and, in some key details, moral coherence. The recent Law Commission Consultation Paper, in a pragmatic and sensible attempt to rid the law and procedure of murder of the malign influence of the mandatory sentence, has unnecessarily compromised such structural coherence as it currently enjoys and which could properly form a satisfactory basis for reform already precise and morally coherent. This is evident both in relation to the abandonment of the attack based template for the fault element in murder, and also in the unwillingness to view the partial defences as affecting the wrong in homicide as opposed to the grade.

Midnight Assassin is a historical study of the murder of John Hossack, a homicide that took place in Iowa at the turn of the twentieth century, and its legal aftermath. Mr. Hossack was killed in his bed as he slept; Mrs. Hossack, who claimed that she was asleep beside him at the time of the attack, was charged with his murder. The book is fascinating in its own right: an analysis of a complex and socially fraught murder case, told through extensive review of original historical documents. But the Hossack murder has already played an interesting and pivotal role in legal education, through a fictional vehicle: writer Susan Glaspell's short story, "A Jury of Her Peers," and her play, "Trifles." Glaspell, a journalist, covered the Hossack murder; subsequently she made a career as an author, co-founded the Provincetown Players, and discovered Eugene O'Neill. Her works based on the Hossack case explore the limits of the legal system in addressing the psychological abuse of a woman by her spouse, and raise complex issues, from the need for gender-based perspectives on factual investigation, to the appropriateness of responding outside the law when the law is unjust. These materials, and the feminist perspective they raise, have been widely used in law school courses and facilitate exploration of a wide range of concerns, from the legal treatment of the battered spouse to issues of nullification, access, and community responsibility. Given the extensive use that has been made of Glaspell's fictional renderings of the Hossack case, my review explores the utility of the "true story" of the Hossack murder. It concludes that, as told from the distinctive editorial perspective of Bryan and Wolf, both the factual and fictional accounts of the murder have distinct value for legal study.

On a charge of murder or manslaughter it must be shown that the person killed was one who was in being. It is neither murder nor manslaughter to kill an unborn child while still in its mother’s womb although it may be the statutory offences of child destruction or abortion. If however the child is born alive and afterwards dies by reason of an unlawful act done to it in the mother’s womb or in the process of birth, the person who committed that act is guilty of murder or manslaughter according to the intent with which the act is done. [Halsbury’s LAWS OF ENGLAND, 4th ed. reissue, Vol. 11 (1). London: Butterworths, 1990.].

In connection with John Searle's denial that computers genuinely act, Hauser considers Searle's attempt to distinguish full-blooded acts of agents (e.g., my raising my arm) from mere physical movements (my arm going up) on the basis of intent. The difference between me raising my arm and my arm's just going up (e.g., if you forcibly raise it), on Searle's account, is the causal involvement of my intention to raise my arm in the former, but not the latter, case. Yet, we distinguish a similar difference between a robot's raising its arm and its robot arm just going up (e.g., if you manually raise it). Either robots are rightly credited with intentions, or it is not intention that distinguishes action from mere movement. In either case full-blooded acts under "aspects" are attributable to robots and computers. Since the truth of such attributions depends on "intrinsic" features of the things not on the speaker's "intentional stance," they are not merely figurative "as if" attributions.

The best reason for believing that robots might some day become conscious is that we human beings are conscious, and we are a sort of robot ourselves. That is, we are extraordinarily complex self-controlling, self-sustaining physical mechanisms, designed over the eons by natural selection, and operating according to the same well-understood principles that govern all the other physical processes in living things: digestive and metabolic processes, self-repair and reproductive processes, for instance. It may be wildly over-ambitious to suppose that human artificers can repeat Nature's triumph, with variations in material, form, and design process, but this is not a deep objection. It is not as if a conscious machine contradicted any fundamental laws of nature, the way a perpetual motion machine does. Still, many skeptics believe--or in any event want to believe--that it will never be done. I wouldn't wager against them, but my reasons for skepticism are mundane, economic reasons, not theoretical reasons.

To build a true conscious robot requires that a robot’s “brain” be capable of supporting the phenomenal consciousness as human’s brain enjoys. Operational Architectonics framework through exploration of the temporal structure of information flow and inter-area interactions within the network of functional neuronal populations [by examining topographic sharp transition processes in the scalp electroencephalogram (EEG) on the millisecond scale] reveals and describes the EEG architecture which is analogous to the architecture of the phenomenal world. This suggests that the task of creating the “machine” consciousness would require a machine implementation that can support the kind of hierarchical architecture found in EEG.

Utilizing the film I, Robot as a springboard, I here consider the feasibility of robot utilitarians, the moral responsibilities that come with the creation of ethical robots, and the possibility of distinct ethics for robot-robot interaction as opposed to robot-human interaction. (This is a revised and expanded version of an essay that originally appeared in IEEE: Intelligent Systems.).