Lucy Letby: Difference between revisions

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 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.
+We are at the intersection of at least four discrete fields of intellectual enquiry here: law, medicine, 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.
+There is even room for epistemology. You cannot but frame your understanding of the overall scenario through one or other of those prisms. Or a combination, but that is liable to lead to conflict. 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 to say that the scenario one that unusually uncertain, and the prospect of consensus is unusually low.
+For the scenario is one that unusually uncertain,  about which the prospect of consensus is unusually low.  It is not even clear that there was a wrongful killing here, let alone by whom.
 ====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.
+{{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]]: a systematic way of economically delivering that ethical framework), and the procedural — the process one must gone through to determine whether a murder was committed.  This includes the the presumption of innocence, the adversarial tradition, the laws of evidence, the rules of court procedure, and tactics and strategies that defence and prosecution teams adopt within that milieu to best present their case, whose outcome is ultimately determined not by judges, lawyers, ethicists statisticians, physicians or metaphysicians but by 12 ordinary people, who may have none of these skills, drawn at random from the electoral roll.
-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-adefence, cannot be convicted of murder because the formal elements are not met.
 Where there is no eye-witness evidence the form and procedure becomes all the more important.