Non-culpable ignorance and HIV criminalisation.

Tracing Culpable Ignorance

In this paper, I respond to the following argument which several authors have presented. If we are culpable for some action, we act either from akrasia or from culpable ignorance. However, akrasia is highly exceptional and it turns out that tracing culpable ignorance leads to a vicious regress. Hence, we are hardly ever culpable for our actions. I argue that the argument fails. Cases of akrasia...

Non - Tracing Cases of Culpable Ignorance

Is Ignorance of Climate Change Culpable?

Sometimes ignorance is an excuse. If an agent did not know and could not have known that her action would realize some bad outcome, then it is plausible to maintain that she is not to blame for realizing that outcome, even when the act that leads to this outcome is wrong. This general thought can be brought to bear in the context of climate change insofar as we think (a) that the actions of ind...

Beyond Belief: Rethinking the Role of Belief in the Assessment of Culpability

The relationship between a criminal defendant’s mistaken factual beliefs and the various Model-Penal-Code-derived culpable mental states has long been thought to be confusing but essentially unproblematic. The confusion, it is said, arises from the courts’ unfortunate practice of “dealing with such mistakes as a matter of defense.” If the courts were to abandon this practice and treat the defen...

ETHICS, LAW, AND MEDICINE The criminalisation of HIV transmission

Since Bennett, Draper, and Frith published a paper in this journal in 2000 considering the possible criminalisation of HIV transmission, an important legal development has taken place. February 2001 saw the first successful United Kingdom prosecution for the sexual transmission of disease for over a century, when Stephen Kelly was convicted in Glasgow of recklessly injuring his former girlfrien...