jessica amber murray
dogs are incapable of mens rea?
i don't know about that. ever had a dog steal a turkey? clearly pre-meditated. and, they clearly know they shouldn't.
i count mens rea + actus reus = criminally responsible.
sentence: six months community service at the orphanage.
Kardinal ZG
They know that they shouldnt? So not only do they have an understanding of property but respect the notion enough to feel guilty if they transgress it? Come on.....
jessica amber murray
it's not property, it's authority - and it's taught. they might not get the why so well, but they know not to eat food on the stove top.
Kardinal ZG
It's kinda impossible to figure out what dogs 'know'. The whole scenario can be explained away by simple behavioural conditioning. Obedience and moral deliberation are not exactly the same.
jessica amber murray
i don't disagree, but the law is also rooted in obedience, rather than morally correct thinking; it seems outlandish to deny dogs can have mens rea based on a lack of moral reasoning, when we don't need moral reasoning to construct mens rea in humans.
Kardinal ZG
If i understand correctly, the mens rea/actus reus distinguishes between the intention and the crime itself. If there is wilful intent to commit a crime as a crime, there is knowledge of its moral character. Now if the law would be extended to animals, a dog ( i hope you realise this conversation is getting ridiculous) committing an offence could at worst be accused of criminal negligence.
Incidently, there was the story of some old german guy that trained his German Shepard Adolf to raise his paw when he scream 'sieh heil'. Of course thats an offence over there, but since the code doesnt specify its specifically for humans, the judge had to find all sorts of loopholes to let the dog off the hook.
jessica amber murray
it's the implication there that i think is problematic, but i'm going to take a step back.
under english law, a crime is technically not a moral wrong but an act that disobeys the monarch's orders. on some level, this is sort of archaic. you can see it's remnant in court cases: R v. Smith is literally the monarch vs. smith. but it's still realistically the way the court system functions. so, under english law, rape isn't illegal due to the immorality of assault but because the king (perhaps through the suggestion of parliament) has decided he doesn't like it when people do that. the question before the courts, then, is not whether the accused has a moral understanding of the wrongness of rape but whether or not the accused formed a mental intent to disobey the king's orders.
you'll have all kinds of philosophers, old and new, try to rationalize that. natural law and whatnot. and they may make a few good points. but it's not what the law is trying to determine. legally, what mens rea refers to is simply whether the act is pre-meditated - whether there was a conscious intent to break the law.
we could pull out an extreme example and break godwin's law on purpose: suppose i built a time machine, went back in time, killed hitler, and then bragged about it. complex moral question; not up to the court to decide. premeditated, therefore guilty.
so, if the dog is sitting there eying the turkey while you're preparing for it, biding it's time, waiting for you to leave before it acts? so long as it knows that jumping up on the stove is "bad", the premeditation to do something "bad", to disobey orders from authority (here the owner, there the king), is enough to build a mens rea, regardless of moral concerns.
Kardinal ZG
I agree, but understanding something as 'bad' (even if that badness is committing offence to the King) seems like it requires deliberation. It seems like a case in which only the act can be punished. This kinda reminds me of the story of that old German dude that trained his german shepard Adolf to lift the paw when he shouted 'sieg heil'. The judge had to find some loophole to let the dog off the hook.
jessica amber murray
well, i think the dog is capable of deliberating on it's decision to obey orders or not. i've seen dogs almost do something they shouldn't, then think twice and stop. it's more than conditioning; dogs are pretty smart, relatively speaking, in the animal world. the thing is that that's really all the law is trying to determine for humans, too.
that dog would have been convicted at the nuremburg trials, although i'd argue something like "not criminally responsible", as the dog lacks the context to understand what it's doing. but that was a rare and isolated situation when the court was actually operating under something close to natural law theory. and, in truth, whether we can collectively come to grips with it or not, it was a set of show trials.
"One area that seems to have potential for showing that dogs have morality is the matter of property. While some might think that dogs regard whatever they can grab (be it food or toys) as their property, this is not always the case. While it seems true that some dogs are Hobbesian, this is also true of humans. Dogs, based on my decades of experience with them, seem to be capable of clearly grasping property. For example, my husky Isis has a large collection of toys that are her possessions. She reliably distinguishes between her toys and very similar items (such as shoes, clothing, sporting goods and so on) that do not belong to her. While I do not know for sure what happens in her mind, I do know that when I give her a toy and go through the “toy ritual” she gets it and seems to recognize that the toy is her property now. Items that are not given to her are apparently recognized as being someone else’s property and are not chewed upon or dragged outside. In the case of Isis, this extends (amazingly enough) even to food—anything handed to her or in her bowl is her food, anything else is not. Naturally, she will ask for donations, even when she could easily take the food. While other dogs have varying degrees of understanding of property and territory, they certainly seem to grasp this. Since the distinction between mine and not mine seems rather important in ethics, this suggests that dogs have some form of basic morality—at least enough to be capitalists."
at least enough to be capitalists. heh.
that's a convincing argument, and conforms to my own experience (my dad had either 2 or 3 dogs at a time for as long as i can remember). however, i think that needs to be tested more rigorously through experiment to determine whether the dog (on average) understands property as a concept or is merely obeying authority. but, really, how many humans understand (personal) property as a concept? i think there's a danger in applying an ideal that we ourselves don't fully conform to.
i know dogs have been rigorously demonstrated to lack an understanding of syntax, in contrast to smarter animals like elephants. what that means is you can teach an elephant what an object is called and what a verb is and then randomly put them together. if an elephant understands "fetch" and knows what "beer" is, you can tell it "fetch beer" and it will put it together and understand it without having to be explicitly taught. dogs need to be taught "fetch beer" as a single command, and can't abstract it to "fetch stick", which needs to be separately taught. what that suggests to me is that it may have difficulty understanding property as an abstract concept, even if it can be taught that each item - individually - belongs to it or doesn't. but that again just pushes off the question of whether it really gets it or is just responding to authority.
http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=6594