Guilty of not doing that!

Abstract

Since ancient times, many legal constructions regarding blame or responsibility require subjects to be deemed accountable for their actions as well as for their omissions. The primary purpose of this work is to account for some legal and philosophical issues regarding the so-called negative events (i.e., events that have not occurred) through the development of two simple ideas. The first idea is to consider that, in most cases, a negative event is simply a normal positive event described negatively. The other idea is to distinguish the causal explanations of an event from the causal reports of an event. In this sense, it is shown how these two ideas not only clarify some fundamental philosophical issues, but they are also an excellent starting point for the interpretation and the application of some legal rules concerning omission.

Keywords

• Event-based perspective of law
• events
• negative events
• omission
• causal omission
• simple omission