Lucio T. Maffei

Actus reus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea (“an act is not culpable unless the mind is guilty”) is a maxim represented in some form in most modern legal systems. It is “a sacred principle of criminal jurisprudence that the intention to commit the crime is the essence of the crime”. To our modern framing of morality, this seems fairly intuitive. Mens rea (“the state of mind or inattention that, together with its accompanying conduct, the criminal law defines as an offense” – Latin for “guilty mind”) is thus required to be shown in the vast majority of criminal cases. However, a critical reevaluation of the doctrine reveals not just concerning weak justifications for the doctrine’s implementation, but inseparable ties between the doctrine and the racialized system of violent incarceration and imperialism it developed to facilitate. First, a survey of its historical origins casts doubts on the universality of criminal systems operating under this framework and contextualizes the maxim in its current form as a product of Christian theology and its institutionalization within imperial British law. Drawing on historical archives and works of legal history, I trace the doctrine from its surprisingly recent origins to its formalization in the U.S. Model Penal Code in 1962 and explore the violent systems of oppression it arose from and the problematic worldview it prescribes. Second, to meet the doctrine as it is, I conduct an examination of the potential philosophical justifications for the doctrine in its present state. I identify three broad categories of metaphysical accounts for what mens rea is offered in available literature: (1) An inherent property, which is further broken down into two sub-categories. The first is what I call soul alteration – that at the time of a guilty act, the perpetrator’s soul gains a property; this is the metaphysical account that religious thinkers like St. Augustine would have been supportive of. The second is that mens rea is truly separated from moral accountability, and that we ought to think of it as a factual determination of whether one held a specific brain state during the commission of an unlawful act. The second is much more compelling in modern times, and the account that I would wager is predominant among jurists, but I will argue that this is a disastrous misunderstanding of the nature of the human mind and decision-making. (2) A mental breach of moral duty, where I consider both Kantian & Utilitarian justifications. Strains of both Kantian and utilitarian ethics derive objective moral rules from rational arguments. Here, the theory of mens rea is an evaluation of whether the perpetrator had a mental state in conflict with rational moral law. For opposite reasons, both accounts fail to provide a reasonable justification for the legal existence of mens rea. (3) A useful social construct. Several formal sources justify mens rea as “merely a convenient label” and rely on practical needs within our modern justice system. I evaluate these reasons and ultimately conclude that while mens rea is indeed a useful social construct, it is one that is useful exclusively for perpetuating injustice. I also explore its connections to racial pseudo-science. Finally, I look to reimagine what a legal system without mens rea could look like. I pull from past and current indigenous groups who practice non-carceral systems of community justice, as well as corners of institutionalized criminal law that operate through “strict liability” – crimes without mental requirements.

The United States’ Civil War was one of the most impactful moments in global history, causing ripples that originated along the North American Eastern Coast but would end up shaking every continent – especially Europe. As Americans turned on Americans to protect or defeat the institution of slavery, the economic elite around the globe carefully calculated which course of action would be most safe and profitable. In this same time period, Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels wrote on the conflict covering everything from the intricacies of the Union military tactics to the application of leftist theory to the concepts of slavery and forced labor. Particularly, the pair commentated on the state of affairs in the United Kingdom as Britain pondered which side it would publicly support and economically condone. Over the many decades that have passed since then, many Marxist and progressive scholars have also used the theories of Marx and Engels to extrapolate claims further reaching than those directly made by the philosophers during their lifetimes. rough examining the contemporary writings of Marx and Engels on the topic and applying their theories to the events, it is revealed that the motivations of capitalism undermined any morality of the British aristocracy and shaped their response to the US Civil War as well as the war itself.

This paper seeks to break what I call the Theist-Atheist Stalemate – atheists say God can’t proven and theists say that God cannot be disproven, seemingly arriving at an en passé where no affirmative stance can be taken on divine existence. My hypothesis we actually can break this stalemate for the atheists and functionally disprove God. To demonstrate that, this paper will delve into an investigation into the most basic structure of our universe. Using this information and some determinations about the nature of statistics and large numbers, we will evaluate the likelihood of God’s existence in a sea of inconceivably many possible worlds. This will be done through a series of premises and conclusions that come to the ultimate conclusion that the probability of God’s existence is unimaginably close to zero.

In this piece, I ultimately argue against the validity of punishment and reward. This is accomplished through accepting three general statements about punishment and deserving, endurance and responsibility, and identity and time. These premises are: (1) Punishment is justified if and only if the thing being punished is deserving of punishment (2) If a thing is deserving of punishment, then the thing being punished must have the exact same properties as the thing that committed the punishment worthy action. (3) It is impossible for any thing being punished to have the exact same properties as the thing that committed the punishment worthy action. I then assert that if this argument is valid and sound, punishment is not justified through a modus tollens relationship. Further, I argue that any metaethical relationship that holds for punishment must also hold for reward just in the inverse. Thus, reward is not justified either. I conclude by discussing what I call the aftermath of accepting this conclusion. If we are to disregard the conceptualizations of punishment and reward, many aspects of our world would be deeply affected as many of our systems of justice and economy would be invalidated. The consequences are too far reaching to full address here, but I focus on how I think this understanding ought to shape our conceptions of debts and responsibilities, criminal justice, and resource distribution.