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Fool wrote

From a legal standpoint this falls down by misrepresenting the initial question, specifically the definition of "without reasonable doubt".

For this, without reasonable doubt does not mean that it is not possible for doubt to be reasoned, but that the doubt is not of a level considered reasonable or acceptable.

Of course which brings us to defining acceptable, but this grey area shows the flaws in trying to prove something isn't this because of the exact arguments you utilised.

In general the dogmatic argument is used because this is a legal matter and an authority has been assigned. If this is not a legal matter, then each observer is their own authority to define what is reasonable to themselves. Furthermore, whether the accused feels guilt is up to themselves as an observer of their own actions.

As much as one can't define reasonable without creating an authority on reasonable, unreasonable will also remain in an area of pointlessness, and even the meaning of the word guilt, which makes the whole exercise moot.

"Judge not lest ye be judged"

Paraphrase of translation of part of Hittites treaty 🐿️

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Fool wrote

This essay has the issue similar to that of the debate of whether "in god we trust" should be on money, when there should not be money in the first place.

The legal system rather than applications of the law needs to be rejected wholesale.

Anyway some further reading I would recommend is Against Innocence by Jackie Wang and We Are All Criminals (PDF) as ways of thinking about criminalisation.

Foucault's analysis in Discipline and Punish of how the change from monarchy to capitalism in Europe came with the invention of 'delinquency' as theft and vagrancy, which focused criminalisation on the people in the lower classes who wouldn't become good workers for capitalism, and created a moralism that authorised their punishment, despite the fact that illegal action takes place across all social strata, would also be useful for this.

  • Tequila Wolf, the other version of this post.
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tuesday wrote

The reasonable doubt standard being nonsense is sort of built into the fact that the entire system is nonsense.

I could go into all of the ways that reasonable doubt should be understood in a criminal trial, and the ways that the system has baked in a bias in favor of prosecution so that that standard means less than it was supposed to mean in the minds of the drafters of the Constitution, but it feels like a practice in futility.

Does it matter why the standard is nonsensical? Sure, if you're working in criminal defense and you're talking to a jury. But otherwise it's a little like arguing about the rules of a game that was meant to be unfair and have been edited in a way that makes it nearly impossible for someone to win. Why argue the rules when we'd rather just not play the game?

If you're arguing against the criminal justice system in the first place, there are better places to start that argument than the legal burden of proof.

With regards to text, specifically, you should lay out what dogmatic argument, infinite regress argument, or circular reasoning means. You give a brief sentence for each but I am still not sure what they mean and so couldn't really follow the rest of the arguments. You also should explain what you mean by reasonable and how it mirrors or differs from the court's use.

The court understands reasonable doubt to mean that there are no other reasonable explanations that can come from the evidence presented. Meaning, looking at the facts as they are laid out and supported through offered evidence, other explanations are not reasonable. Patterson v. New York and Mullaney v. Wilbur lay out the standards for reasonable doubt.

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