Crime, punishment and 'specific' evidence

This event is being hosted jointly with the Department of Philosophy.

Dr Katie Steele is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the London School of Economics.  Her research interests include rational and social choice theory, philosophy of probability, environmental philosophy and decision-making.

Abstract

Various real and imagined criminal law cases provoke the intuition that there is something wanting with statistical evidence in the court-room, i.e. the appeal to trends associated with a large collective whose members are similar to the candidate in question. These cases are referred to as the 'proof paradoxes'. An oft-expressed position is that legal verdicts should be based on 'specific' rather than 'general' evidence of guilt. (More provocatively: 'The accused should not be judged guilty due to their membership of a group'.) But it is unclear what this distinction amounts to, and we must further ask: Is general evidence supposedly problematic for epistemic reasons, or rather for moral reasons? We argue that moral considerations should not influence the import of legal evidence, all other things being equal. And given the salient ways of distinguishing specific and general evidence, there is, moreover, no good epistemic reason for downgrading the latter. We go on to provide a less natural definition of specific versus general evidence such that the latter is epistemically flawed, by ordinary probabilistic standards. Our distinction, however, only explains intuitions for some of the proof paradoxes; in the other cases we effectively bite the bullet, but we also indicate what extra factors may be driving intuitions, for better and worse.

Read Dr Steele's full profile