Levin Güver

_cries in £20k London PhD stipend_

Now out!✨ If thinking about the philosophical foundations of criminal liability excites you, this article may just be for you.😁

Available here: www.elgaronline.com/view/journal...

For many more wacky vignettes and a thorough discussion of the findings both for the law and the literature on ordinary causal judgement more generally, check out the paper!😇 /12

🔗 sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

…is biased, then this spells trouble for the law! After all, it would be patently unjust to hold an agent liable for some unrelated harm due to the colour of their hat or the knot with which they tie their trash bag (to give another example of a silly norm that was tested). /11

There is one area of our lives in which causal judgements are especially consequential: the law!🧑‍⚖️ Interestingly, several jurisdictions explicitly peg their legal concept of causation to its ordinary counterpart. But if the ordinary concept of causation… /10

…asking for their causal judgements prior to the outcome’s occurrence, or by allowing them to reflect on the irrelevance of the norm, they find the effects to largely subside. Okay, so perhaps ordinary causal judgement really is biased – but why should we care? /9

Over the course of five experiments, we try to see whether this effect can be explained by recourse to some relevant mediating variable – to no avail. Yet when they confront participants with debiasing techniques, such as… /8

What they find is startling: participants deem the blue-hat-wearing agent, and not the technician, as the cause! However, when they are told that the agent wore the right coloured hat, participants’ causal judgements reverse, and they now deem the technician as the cause. /7

In one scenario, participants were told of an agent who, contrary to some music festival’s policy, wore a different coloured hat. Later, some powder was fired into the crowd which, upon coming into contact with the agent’s cigarette, exploded. Who caused the explosion? /6

In our paper, we try to shed light on the mechanisms that drive the Norm Effect. Over the course of five experiments (N=2’688), we argue that the Norm Effect largely is the product of a blame-driven bias! /3

When two agents jointly bring about an outcome, while one of the agents is violating some prescriptive norm, we ordinarily deem the norm-violating agent as ‘the’ cause of the outcome. This is known as the Norm Effect. /2

Are our ordinary causal judgements biased?🔍And if so, is this really a problem?🧐Yes and yes✅, we (Markus Kneer and I) argue our newest paper! A short thread 🧵 /1

Open access: shorturl.at/FcWDF

In order to demonstrate that ordinary causal reasoning really is biased – and not just, say, inextricably connected to judgements of responsibility and blame – we explore whether the Norm Effect arises even for the violation of entirely silly norms🤪. /5

Instead of looking who caused the accident and approportioning blame accordingly, they argue that the mechanism frequently is reversed: we see that some agent violated a norm, and want to ‘stick it’ to them. And what better way than to render their contribution more causal? /4

Congratulations, incredible work!

Hi @yalelawschool-yls.bsky.social :-P

Hello Blue Sky! Follow for regular updates on upcoming and new posts on the Criminal Justice Theory Blog, where we discuss interesting ideas in simple terms. And while you are at it, skim through our back catalogue, and get in touch if you'd like to pitch us a piece. 🤓

Thank you!

Really interesting! Would love to read up on this, but the link isn't working for me

Many thanks to the UCL Centre for Criminal Law (@markedsouza1.bsky.social in particular) for the invitation, and to @levinguever.bsky.social for the insightful comments. It was a pleasure to speak on the challenges of assessing mens rea. Looking forward to continuing the discussion! #lawsky #crimsky

Heck yeah! Can't wait to watch these!!!

This has been hailed as one of the usecases of blockchain. I remember a crypto coin that was promising just this (safe and transparent identity verification). Do you think this could be promising, or would you prefer a government body do it?

Criminalisation and its limits by Levin Güver In this post, I push back against recent suggestions that not all deviations between criminal law and morality are to be regretted (such that we should see them as cases in which we …

It's an honor and a pleasure to be on the receiving end of such smart criticisms as these. Worth a read! Thanks to @levinguever.bsky.social for the thought-provoking essay.

criminaljusticetheoryblog.wordpress.com/2024/11/15/c...

A really interesting piece by @levinguever.bsky.social in the Criminal Justice Theory Blog, engaging with some of the work of @should-b-workin.bsky.social and legal moralism more broadly. Great work, Levin! 🤓

Thanks a lot, JP, very kind of you!

Assessing mens rea: How Criminal Law Disapproves of Our Reasons for Action This lecture is organised by the UCL Centre for Criminal Law

UCL Centre for Criminal Law presents Philipp-Alexander Hirsch (csl.mpg.de/en/philipp-a...) on 'Assessing mens rea: How Criminal Law Disapproves of Our Reasons for Action'. Comments by
@levinguever.bsky.social. Nov 25, 6:00pm. Details, booking: eventbrite.co.uk/e/assessing-....

This is really helpful, thanks a lot, Marthe! I'd also like to be added if possible. :-)

😇🥳

I'd love to receive a copy of this year's newsletter please!

Interesting! I believe it allows for a more accurate assessment of the candidate's strengths and weaknesses, as one can go much deeper in an interview than by just looking at the application files. I do acknowledge the downsides, though, and will think about it more. :-)