Who is a victim of homicide?
In this lecture I will discuss the question of an ontological status of a victim of homicide in order to clarify the significance of homicide in contexts of legal and moral philosophies. The starting point is in that the victim must be understood as a non-existence by definition. Does that victim suffer harm? If we answer yes as we usually suppose, we should face a traditional view of death proposed by Epicurus, which I will call the harmlessness theory of death. I will tackle this problem by considering causal influence brought about by what the victim left before their death. I will also mention the issue of posthumous predications, suggesting proper semantics for that through the argument on the causal influence of the victim. Abstract Lecture 2 – 22nd November 2010 Freedom, Responsibility, and Natural Phenomena In this lecture I will examine an aspect of the traditional problem of freedom and responsibility by taking a biological point of view into account, in order to aim at clari
