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Moral Responsibility and Free Will News!

• Assessing Kayne West's statements.

• Philevents.org. This week. [1]

• not MRFW, but news. [2]

• Parkland shooter sentence and victim’s family responses.

• Puzzle about MR. Why should perspective matter? The case of the drowsy professor. Follow up. I think “self-interest” makes the responses consistent.

• Example of Christina Bobb, Trump lawyer at risk of prosecution. [3]

• Example of group or collective responsibility. [4]

• Police cited as responsible for Soccer stadium stampede. [5]

• Compare the moral responsibility of these two cases:

• Iranian exile who feels responsibility for effective of current protests. [6]
• Someone who promotes a conspiracy theory (take your pick) that induces others to commit a crime.

• Are there moral "mistakes"? How do we assess a mistake in relation to desert based responsibility?

• Police who mistakes gun for taser, police who mistakes her apartment for another.[7] [8]
• Chicago case of police who loses taser to Patrick Loyoya.
• Did Kyle Rittenhouse have a clear understanding of why he travelled to the riot?
• Manslaughter 1 and 2 [9]

• Police park cruiser on tracks. Train comes. [10]

• The case of Alec Jones. [11]

• Indictments in massive covid-relief fraud scheme. Different intuitions about MR for white collar crime? [12]

• Bad behavior by ducks. [13] Recalling a bad day for Zags. Nice group responsibility example.

• Johnson & Johnson's strategy for avoiding liability in asbestos cases. A New Yorker article on the topic is in the shared folder. See this news article for a short explanation. If MR doesn’t makes sense, then J&J isn’t avoiding theirs.

• New episode of This American Life, "Ends of the Earth," which is mostly a version of Amy Bloom’s In Love, a moving account of her husband’s dementia and physician-assisted suicide in Switzerland with Dignitas. You don’t get too many accounts of that process, and none like this one. In addition to the immediate issue of assisted suicide, it highlights another avowed “basic liberty” that Americans must travel for.

• Since Dennett mentions ants.. Ok, a stretch. [14]

• A civil lawsuit was announced today, alleging fraudulent dealings by former US president Trump. Note on the complexity of establishing "desert-based responsibility" in these sorts of cases.

• Campaign against site that harasses transgender and neuro-divergent (e.g. including autistic persons) persons. [15]

• Antiquities scandal, like the bestseller. [16]

• An MR angle on recent stories of health care workers and doctors who are finding it difficult to provide women's reproductive services in a shifting and ambiguous legal environment.

• Mentioned in Radio Lab segment 2, predictive sentencing algorithms. [17]

• Canadian stabbing spree and brutal Tennessee murder. Perpetrators common features.

• Throwing out convictions

• Collective vs. Individual Responsibility. How do you study policing problems with data? [18]

• Another side of neoliberal punishment. CEO rewards. [19]

• Supreme Courts rejects limits on Life Terms for Youths. [20]

• Intuitions about the Chauvin punishment. Do you have distinct intuitions about the type of finding of guilt vs. the incarceration. Would you have been surprised or upset if the punishment came to 6, 12, or 18 years?

• Example of “category shift” from criminalization to protection. Is this an inappropriate abandonment of an opportunity to give deserved punishment? [21]

• Just in at Foley! The Routledge handbook of the philosophy and science of punishment [22]

• Using the Veil of Ignorance to think about just punishment. Dolovich article.

• Speaking irresponsibly. Tucker Carlson encourages vaccine conspiracies.

• My first encounter with the penal system. A story about turkeys and hold punchers in 1st grade.

• Taking responsibility for pygmy rabbits. [23], [24]

• So this is Free Will news for a naturalist. [25]

• Are you alright? Relates to Dennett's point at 300 about probability to commit a crime and the "public health" model.

• Test your intuitions about the limits of science here. [26]

• Prime mammal found in my Ethics class! "Real" "Pure" Altruism!

• A story from the Innocence Project's Conviction Integrity Unit - Toforest Johnson. [27]

• Why it is so difficult to listen to the George Floyd murder trial.

• Minnesota case recalls old Italian court judgement [28].

• Mass shootings, gun buying, and the pandemic. [29], [30]. The existence of large trends might belie explanations that focus on individual moral responsibility.

• Example of "cultural disfunction" in "go to" narratives for mass shootings.

• Thinking about mass shootings, predictability, and responsibility.

• Tragic multiple shooting in Atlanta. Consider two possibilities....

• MR issues inside the $2 trillion dollar pandemic plan.

• Some follow ups on the terrible car crash. [31], [32]

• Nxivm cult doctor defends "branding" women in the cult. [33]

• WA Supreme Court decision invalidates drug possession law. [34]

• Is anyone morally responsible for the Texas power grid failure? This discussion might be a neat basis for an analogy between group(social)/individual responsibility. Second example, Are we collectively responsible for the rate at which people believed in conspiracies? Could a town share responsibility for the accidents on a stretch of road known to be dangerous?

• Pride is also about "esteem," maybe a better opposing term to shame. "I'm proud of myself," roughly, "I have done something estimable."

• Virginia becomes the first Southern state to eliminate the death penalty. Interesting reporting on crime victims responses. A proxy for retribution in some cases.

• Update on "I'm so proud of you."

• Not just Olympic officials make moral mistakes. [35]

• In terms of our course research, what does it mean for a parent to say "I'm proud of my kids."?

• Investigation completed in helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant, his daughter, and guests.

• Discussion with friend about adoption.

• Discussion with friend about BJW and Christian commitments. "Oh, right. Injustice is our fault."

• Marjorie Taylor Greene case is sometimes discussed in terms of "punishment" and sometimes in terms of being "unqualified" to be on an Education Committee in the House of Representatives.

• Guy at the Lowe's without a mask. Retributive thought process follows. Retributive emotions can also be channeled verbally.

• Bill Gates interview touches on MR issue of praise and luck. Listen at 17:24 for one minute.

• New Capitol Hill Police Chiefs apologizes for failures on January 6. Let's take a minute to think about how apologies relate to blame and accepting responsibility.

• Throughout the pandemic, there has been a persistent discussion about the degree of responsibility we should take for reducing deaths and avoiding behaviors that spread the virus.

• Occassionally, we will use this segment to learn about one of the saints in the class. Today: Baba Fakruddin

• Capitol Hill Police officer who led insurrectionists away from Senate is promoted and honored at the Inauguration today.

• How do we assess the culpability of a mob under the influence of a conspiracy theory? Does "radicalization" compromise responsibility?

• Rethinking penalties for Vets.

• Recent Supreme Court executions raise questions about MR.