Lethal Weapon: How Pennsylvania's Stand-Your-Ground Law Effectively Limits the Reasonable Belief Element of Self-Defense

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Bayesian Thinking for Toddlers

Bayesian thinking is easy, and toddlers do it all the time. The fundamental principle is learning from experience: hypotheses that predict the data well receive a boost in plausibility, whereas hypotheses that predict the data poorly suffer a decline. For example, hypothesis A could state “At 6 am my parents will generally be asleep” and hypothesis B could state “At 6 am my parents will generally be awake”. When a toddler then wakes up at 6 am and notices that both parents are still sound asleep, this observation increases the plausibility of hypothesis A and decreases that of hypothesis B. Easy! Knowledgeable readers will discover that the dinosaur cover story hints at concepts such as Ockham’s razor, coherent knowledge updating, and probability as degree of reasonable belief. Statisticians may recognize Phil Dawid's prequential principle in action. Toddlers may just want to look at the dinosaurs.

It’s All or Nothing: Consent, Reasonable Belief, and the Continuum of Sexual Violence in Judicial Logic

This paper discusses controversies over the reasonable belief in consent defence to sexual assault shared by many common law jurisdictions. The implementation of a ‘reasonable’ belief standard has been heralded as a safeguard against rape myth narratives that endorsed men’s unreasonable but ‘honest’ beliefs in women’s consent. This paper argues that judicial constructions of reasonable belief in consent continue to apply notions of reasonableness abstracted from the social context of women’s experience of sexual violence and disconnected from sociological insights which contextualise both the encounter and jury decisions. Using a feminist sociocultural analysis (Gavey, 2005; Kelly, 1988), the successful appeal in the case of R v Lennox (2018 Queensland, Australia), against his conviction by a jury is discussed. The reasoning in the Lennox appeal reveals that overriding judicial constructions of women as incredible in their communication of non-consent, and the prevailing legal dichotomies of consent, and credibility as ‘all or nothing’, undo the progressive potential of the standard of ‘reasonableness’ in consent law and reinforce the phallocentrism of legal discourse.

5. Sexual Offences

The Concentrate Questions and Answers series offers the best preparation for tackling exam questions. Each book includes typical questions, diagram answer plans, suggested answers, author commentary, and advice on study skills. This chapter presents sample exam questions on sexual offences and suggested answers. Students should be aware of the key provisions of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, and the presumptions as to consent contained in ss 75 and 76 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003. The concept of reasonable belief is central to this topic. The Act sought to remedy problems in the old law relating to consent and created a new definition of rape, as well as shifting the responsibility for obtaining consent to the defendant in some circumstances.

Perspectival Skeptical Theism

Skeptical theists have paid insufficient attention to non-evidential components of epistemic rationality. I address this lacuna by constructing an alternative perspectivalist understanding of epistemic rationality and defeat that, when applied to skeptical theism, yields a more demanding standard for reasonably affirming the crucial premise of the evidential argument from suffering. The resulting perspectival skeptical theism entails that someone can be justified in believing that gratuitous suffering exists only if they are not subject to closure-of-inquiry defeat; that is, a type of defeat that prevents reasonable belief that p even if p is very probable on an agent’s evidence.

Miracles and reasonable belief

What does it mean to say that something is miraculous, and is it reasonable to form the opinion that such things can happen? The chapter combines human experience and philosophical reflection. It is difficult to formulate a tight definition of miracles, yet we have some pragmatic notion of what we mean by the term. The same can be said of ‘laws of nature’. Attempts to show that it is never reasonable to think that a miracle occurred are themselves faulty. This includes Hume’s argument about human testimony, as well as more recent philosophical attempts. But this does not deflect our intellectual duty to be cautious, to care about truth, to seek scientific understanding, and not be gullible. A miraculous event is out of the ordinary, but not arbitrarily so; it exhibits a larger pattern. Human life involves a combination of complimentary modes of thinking.

5. Sexual Offences

The Concentrate Questions and Answers series offers the best preparation for tackling exam questions. Each book includes typical questions, diagram answer plans, suggested answers, author commentary and advice on study skills. This chapter presents sample exam questions on sexual offences and suggested answers. Students should be aware of the key provisions of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, and the presumptions as to consent contained in ss. 75 and 76 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003. The concept of reasonable belief is central to this topic. The Act sought to remedy problems in the old law relating to consent and created a new definition of rape as well as shifting the responsibility for obtaining consent to the defendant in some circumstances.