Shakespeare and his arguments, persuasion through Poetry and prose

'O, what may man within him hide, Though angel on the outward side!'

'authority, though it err like others, 
Hath yet a kind of medicine in itself That skins the vice o' th' top.'

'Say what you can: my false o'erweighs your true.'

'my authority bears a so credent bulk

That no particular scandal once can touch

But it confounds the breather'

My vouch against you, and my place i' th' state,

Will so your accusation overweigh

That you shall stifle in your own report, And smell of calumny.

'let your reason serve

To make the truth appear where it seems hid,

And hide the false seems true.'

On the profound nature and culpability of omissions.

A new piece coming shortly on the determination methodology of the form and features of the 'mens rea' associated with the negatively characterised 'actus reus' in omissions as part of a course of conduct. Please return soon.

Acts and Omissions, or Acts and Omissions, depend upon the 'mens mentis' or 'mens rea' of the actors.

At first thought, an omission appears to be simply not an act. In formal notational logic the symbol ~ being used for the term NOT, and a variable being P which can be substituted for, by any valid proposition.

Thus a thing done, an ACT, or deed may be referred to by the variable P.

Where that same act is not done it simply conforms to, not P (~P).

In this form, omissions appear to be simply the equivalents of their counterparts being non acts.

Thus the act of crossing the road, is measured by its counterpart omission as not crossing the road.

In its simplest form, such acts, deeds and things done, without particular consequence have their counterpart in omissions, as simple acts and simple omissions.

Where thought is involved, and that thought has the nature of decision and intentionality, the acts and omissions begin to take on a completely different nature than their simple 'enactments'.

Thus,where I cross the road to help a blind person across, my intention will be seen as the kind of act, in good faith, that helps to avoid the dire consequences of leaving the blind person to the outcome of an accident in a street where there is little noise warning of impending danger. In the same circumstance, where I omit this deed, with the 'mens rea', that I hold some grudge or hatred for the person and wish them to fall into danger, then the omission becomes a culpable one.

The difficulty is that of getting into the mind of the actor of the omission, to examine the nature of his 'mens rea' at the relevant moment, determining if there was any duty of care he owed the victim. On both sides this becomes an art for the 'omiter' to so cloak his omission as simple negligence and thereby eliminate or minimise culpability, and the skill in advocacy at cross examination to illuminate the 'mens rea' that accompanied the omission. This is not too difficult for a careful thinker.

Change the situation very slightly and let us say that there is a present clear danger, where there exists such an ACT P, that its counterpart omission ~P has a fatal consequence on the individual in question. From one living entity to another, such a deed is deemed to be at first sight, a simple omission, or simple negligence. Once one begins the enquiry into the state of mind and intentionality of the actor, one comes close to the kind of omissions I am concerned with in this exposition.

That class of omissions that falls to a category of such terms as 'he/she ignored the signals', 'he deliberately ignored the signals',or the 'signals made little or no impression on him' are the factors in determination of degree of culpability that now begin to take serious proportion where a person is under some duty of care, such as a parent, person in 'locus parentis', or holds public office, and whose conduct is governed by a code of practice, set of rules or even some notion of tortious liability where negligence is shown to be either wilful or otherwise.

To tease out a poignant aspect of this kind of omission, a parent who negligently omits to take his/her 4 year old child to school, allowing the child to go unaccompanied, due to a moment of perhaps understandable irritation or anger, and loses that child to an accident, will live forever after with the burden of culpability that he/she should have been there at such a time when they were not. Under such a circumstance, that parent reveals the true vastidity of the notion of culpability I am pursuing in this critique. Though a court may well allow this person to go free, it may well be so on account of the fact that the parent is likely to pay for this omission for the rest of his/her natural life.

It only takes a split second of decision making to pursue a course of conduct that becomes clearly inured to the degree that an examination of the course of conduct over time, shows it is unvarying, and accompanied by persistence and determination. Such omissions are negatively characterised acts plain and simple. They are as culpable as their identical counterparts who's consequences are of the same intentionality.

We are not concerned with omissions as they seem, or as they may appear, we are concerned with them as they ARE, in their full context of thinking or directing minds governing the act or omission..