PHILOS 5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Inchoate Offense, Mens Rea, Timothy Mcveigh
Document Summary
Romantic: focus on authenticity; sympathetic to thinking in groups. Liberal: focuses on the individual & reason; reductive. Europe: conception of society as a family (organic whole). Everyone has certain obligations and responsibilities to everyone else. Us: criminal law affected by individualistic orientation, people can go about lives without any interference except when there"s some specific relationship in question. Liberals don"t have problems with corporations being held guilty. Problems: logical fallacy to move from the fact that one person"s actions represents the whole. We are committed in our thinking to ascribe certain attributes to a collective. We say that the us government was guilty of ill treatment towards japanese. Problem with adoption of attitude: it"s the kind of thinking that underlies anti-semitism. Jewish held guilty for sin that may have been committed thousands of years ago. Way to handle it is to limit guilt to jews who were living at the time so collective guilt does not expand beyond them.
