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Lucy Letby: Difference between revisions
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Lucy Letby’s case is in the news and those internet citizens who have taken more than a passing interest have divided into opposing camps: a large preponderance for whom she is a cold-blooded monster, and a small band who, based on statistics, have questioned the safety of her conviction. Some of those have spilled over into the conviction that Letby absolutely did not wilfully kill anyone. | Lucy Letby’s case is in the news and those internet citizens who have taken more than a passing interest have divided into opposing camps: a large preponderance for whom she is a cold-blooded monster, and a small band who, based on statistics, have questioned the safety of her conviction. Some of those have spilled over into the conviction that Letby absolutely did not wilfully kill anyone. | ||
JC has his opinions, which we will get to, but the first step is to keep an open mind. Once you firm a view anything can be shoveled into suiting your narrative, or weeded out as being irrelevant to it. This opposite of [[confirmation bias]] we call [[ignore|ignorance bias]], for want of a better expression. Both can be used in service of either certainty: that Lucy Letby is a serial killer, or the victim of a grave injustice. Both standpoints are equally ''emotive''. There is no comfortable centre to hold here. | |||
We are at the intersection of at least four discrete fields of intellectual enquiry here: law, epistemology, statistics and ethics. They are not commensurate — they each have their own rules, customs and institutions and authority in one does not commute to the others. In a perfect world their outcomes would converge, but the world is not perfect. There will be circumstances in which the correct legal outcome is not morally right, the correct moral outcome is not borne by the statistics, the statistics are at odds with our knowledge, and vice versa. There is little wonder good people get upset. | |||
You cannot but frame your understanding of the scenario through one or other of those prisms. There is no transcendent, neutral frame of reference by which the others may be judged. Without a framework the territory is random, incoherent noise. But enough about cognitive relativism. | |||
But to say that the scenario one that unusually uncertain, and the prospect of consensus is unusually low. | |||
====Substance, form and process==== | |||
{{Drop|T|he first thing}} to bear in mind is the difference between the ''substantive'' — the wilful morally unjustified ending of a life (this is an ''ethical'' frame of reference), the ''formal'' — the commission of the act of murder as defined in law (in some ways an ethicist’s [[map]] of the [[territory]]), and the procedural — the process gone through to determine whether a murder was committed. | |||
These are different questions, with different considerations, and it is important they are not confused. A person who murders unobserved in cold blood, leaving no evidence, and without motive cannot be convicted of murder. The procedural element fails. A person who kills in cold blood, before witnesses but in demonstrable, reasonable self defence, cannot be convicted of murder because the formal elements are not met. | These are different questions, with different considerations, and it is important they are not confused. A person who murders unobserved in cold blood, leaving no evidence, and without motive cannot be convicted of murder. The procedural element fails. A person who kills in cold blood, before witnesses but in demonstrable, reasonable self defence, cannot be convicted of murder because the formal elements are not met. | ||