When Does a “Shock Target” Lose Its Value? Target Repetition Consequences for Challenging Lethal Force Stimuli

Author(s):  
Adam T. Biggs ◽  
Gregory Huffman ◽  
Joseph Hamilton ◽  
Ken Javes ◽  
Rachel Markwald
2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 441-469 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rob McLaughlin

Now a person, whether a magistrate, or a peace-officer, who has the duty of suppressing a riot, is placed in a very difficult situation, for if, by his acts, he causes death, he is liable to be indicted for murder or manslaughter, and if he does not act, he is liable to an indictment on an information for neglect; he is, therefore, bound to hit the precise line of his duty: and how difficult it is to hit that precise line, will be a matter for your consideration, but that, difficult as it may be, he is bound to do. R v Pinney (1832) 5 Car & P [254], [270] (Littledale J). A soldier is bound to obey any lawful order which he receives from his military superior. But a soldier cannot any more than a civilian avoid responsibility for breach of the law by pleading that he broke the law in bona fide obedience to the orders (say) of the commander-in-chief. Hence the position of a soldier is in theory and may be in practice a difficult one. He may, as it has been well said, be liable to be shot by a court-martial if he disobeys an order, and to be hanged by a judge and jury if he obeys it. A V Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of Constitution (10th ed, 1959) 303.


Author(s):  
Erica Marat

This chapter, on Kyrgyzstan, demonstrates how diverse and dynamic civil society mobilized in support of police overhaul following the state’s use of lethal force against civilian demonstrators in central Bishkek in 2010. The political leadership pledged to overhaul the police to avoid a repetition of bloodshed. Engaging with a range of NGOs, civic activists, and MPs, the Interior Ministry has addressed reform in a chaotic and unpredictable manner. Civil society actors representing NGOs bickered among themselves, while their demands to depoliticize the Interior Ministry differed altogether from those of the ministry. Nevertheless, the concept paper that emerged following numerous forums was driven by a consensus between a range of nonstate and state actors.


Author(s):  
Alec D. Walen

This book operates on two levels. On the more practical level, its overarching concern is to answer the question, When is it permissible to use lethal force to defend people against threats? The deeper concern of the book, however, is to lay out and defend a new account of rights, the mechanics of claims. This framework constructs rights from the premise that rights provide a normative space in which people can pursue their own ends while treating each other as free and equal fellow-agents whose welfare morally matters. According to the mechanics of claims, rights result from first weighing competing patient-claims on an agent, then determining if the agent has a strong enough agent-claim to act contrary to the balance of patient-claims on her, and then looking to see if special claims limit her freedom. The strength of claims in this framework reflects not just the interest in play but the nature of the claims. Threats who have no right to threaten have weaker claims not to be harmed than bystanders who might be harmed as a side effect, all else equal. With this model, a central problem in just war theory can be pushed to the margins: determining when people have forfeited their rights and are liable to harm. Threats may lack a right not to be killed even if they have done nothing to forfeit it.


This volume combines philosophical analysis with normative legal theory. Although both disciplines have spent the past fifty years investigating the nature of the principles of necessity and proportionality, these discussions were all too often walled off from each other. However, the boundaries of these disciplinary conversations have recently broken down, and this volume continues the cross-disciplinary effort by bringing together philosophers concerned with the real-world military implications of their theories and legal scholars who frequently build doctrinal arguments from first principles, many of which herald from the historical just war tradition or from the contemporary just war literature. What unites the chapters into a singular conversation is their common skepticism regarding whether the traditional doctrines, in both law and philosophy, have correctly valued the lives of civilians and combatants at war. The arguments outlined in this volume reveal a set of principles, including necessity and proportionality, whose core essence remains essentially contested. What does military necessity mean and are soldiers always subject to lethal force? What is proportionality and how should military commanders attach a value to a military target and weigh it against collateral damage? Do these valuations remain the same for both sides of the conflict? From the secure viewpoint of the purely descriptive, lawyers might confidently describe some of these questions as settled. But many others, even from the vantage point of descriptive theory, remain under-analyzed and radically lacking in clarity and certainty.


2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (10) ◽  
pp. 867-874 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Pizarro Andersen ◽  
Paula Maria Di Nota ◽  
Brett Beston ◽  
Evelyn Carol Boychuk ◽  
Harri Gustafsberg ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  

1988 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 715-721 ◽  
Author(s):  
Salvador Algarabel ◽  
Alfonso Pitarque ◽  
Maria José Soler
Keyword(s):  

Activational theories of memory assume that activation from several sources adds up to an intersecting node. We tested this idea in one experiment where we kept constant the number of primes presented and we manipulated the number of different primes related to the target, the number of presentations of the same prime, or the same target, presented as a prime. We used a task in which the target was always a word, which appeared written backward and had to be identified. We found a strong effect of target repetition and diminished priming in the condition in which the target was repeated. We obtained additivity (greater activation) mainly in the condition in which we presented several different primes, replicating and extending past results.


2021 ◽  
pp. 088740342110383
Author(s):  
Scott M. Mourtgos ◽  
Ian T. Adams ◽  
Samuel R. Baty

Most use-of-force policies utilized by U.S. police agencies make fundamental ordinal assumptions about officers’ force responses to subject resistance. These policies consist of varying levels of force and resistance along an ordinally ranked continuum of severity. We empirically tested the ordinal assumptions that are ubiquitous to police use-of-force continua within the United States using 1 year’s use-of-force data from a municipal police department. Applying a quantitative technique known as categorical regression with optimal scaling, we found the assumptions of ordinality within the studied department’s use-of-force continuum (which is similar to many police use-of-force continua within the United States) are not met. Specifying physical force as a “lower” force option than less-lethal tools is associated with increased officer injury and decreased subject injury. Our findings call into question use-of-force continua featuring ordinal rankings for varying categories of less-lethal force.


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