Critical Thinking Workshop 1 - What is a Crime?

Inspire Critical Thinking 2023/24

Does Crime Always Deserve Punishment?

WORKSHOP 1: WHAT IS A CRIME?

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inspire@sjc.ox.ac.uk sjcinspire.com

Contents

WELCOME TO INSPIRE CRITICAL THINKING 2024

WORKSHOP ONE: What is a Crime?

Dr Tom Kemp: editor, Emeritus Fellow in Biology, St John’s College; Lily Middleton Mansell: student editor, English graduate, St John’s College

WELCOME TO INSPIRE CRITICAL THINKING?

03 Does Crime Always Deserve Punishment?

04 How do I use the workshops?

05 Introduction to Workshop 1 - What is a crime?

06 Crime in times of war: The moral implications of the atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Physics and Philosophy) - Jimmy Brewer 10 Can a machine commit a crime? (Philosophy and Technology) - Dr David Lee 14 Critical Thinking Skills Workshop (Credibility) - Lily Middleton-Mansell, Alfred Dry, Ciara Beale and Zi Ning Lau 19 Loopholes in the Law: How workers’ unions were criminalised for conspiracy (History) – Katie Inwood 22 How can a doctor Become a criminal? (Medicine and Law) - Azeez Shekoni & Rachel Pindar & Jonathan Hampshire 26 Cybercrime: How much of a threat is it? – Tom Kemp 29 University Spotlight: The Oxford Night Climbers – Lily Middleton-Mansell 32 What does it mean to be innocent? (Philosophy) - Professor Nick Jones 35 ChatGPT and plagiarism (Classics and Technology) – Dylan Worsley and ChatGPT 38 Why did the Victorians think Oscar Wilde was a criminal? (History) - Katie Inwood

Crime and Punishment

41 What is crime fiction? (English Literature) – Lily Middleton-Mansell 44 University Spotlight: Introducing… College Families – Lily Middleton-Mansell 47 University Spotlight: A typical relaxing day as an undergraduate - Lily Middleton-Mansell 47 University Spotlight: Studying Medicine at Oxford - Jonathan Hampshire 48 Coming up – summary of workshop 2 and the summer schools

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This is the fifth year St John’s College has produced its Critical Thinking online programme, and we have grown very proud of it and the 1500 or more annual participants! It is aimed primarily at Years 9 to 11 and is designed for students of all abilities and interests. We are glad to say there is no charge for full participation, neither online nor for coming to our associated Oxford Summer School at St John’s College.

Each programme centres around a broad area of human interest, with contributions from many of our colleagues, who are leading, and often internationally renowned academics, and who bring to the topic a wealth of different scholarly viewpoints from the arts, the humanities and the sciences alike. We all share a passionate commitment to education at every level, encouraging students to broaden their understanding of the world and develop their critical thinking skills. We are bombarded nowadays with information from so many sources, some truthful and reliable, others sadly unreliable and maliciously prejudiced. If your generation is going to try and make the world a better place, then it is essential that you learn

how to critically assess rather than unthinkingly accept what you hear and read.

The broad area we have chosen for this year is “Crime and Punishment”.

Few aspects of human behaviour have been so pervasive throughout society. Ideas of what even is criminal have changed throughout the course of history and amongst different communities. Philosophers have agonised over what are appropriate punishments, and social scientists over the causes of crime. Several branches of science look at improving ways of apprehending criminals, and medicine is interested in discovering treatments for a tendency towards violence and aggression. Think how much crime enters literature, from the great classics to all those detective novels, into film and drama.

How many wonderful medieval and renaissance paintings depict cruel punishments?

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DOES CRIME ALWAYS DESERVE PUNISHMENT? The programme is divided into four successive workshops: What is a crime?

Are some crimes excusable?

How effective is crime detection and the justice system?

What is punishment and how has it changed through history?

Submit your super challenge piece by the 26th January 2024 for a chance to win.

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Throughout this workshop you will find several interactive tasks:

Think pieces

INTRODUCTION TO WORKSHOP 1

Have your say

WHAT IS A CRIME?

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HOW DO I USE THE WORKSHOPS?

Vote now

Super challenges

These are all optional and give you the ability to choose how much you’d like to be involved. There are also resources to help you independently explore the topic in more detail.

The 4 super challenges require a little more thinking but offer you the opportunity to complete a task and a chance to win a prize! You may submit a response to one super challenge per workshop. This can be in any format you wish. Submit your super challenge response to inspire@sjc.ox.ac.uk for the chance to win a £10 One4All voucher. With your submission please let us know: Your name Your School ■ Your year group ■ Whether you are happy for us to share your work on social media.

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Welcome to this first workshop. As you read the articles, watch the videos, follow up the links, and consider some of our puzzles, we hope you will think particularly about what exactly crime is. It may seem obvious that such things as murder, robbery, financial fraud, assault, and dangerous driving are crimes, but what about the newer or less obvious crimes? Every human society, past and present, has had some code of conduct, expressing how it expects people to behave for society to run smoothly.

Minor transgressions of the informal code, such as discourtesy and selfishness, are usually merely disapproved of, but more serious ones that significantly disadvantage or hurt someone else or damage their property are called crimes and constitute a formal criminal code. A society tries to reduce these anti-social activities by creating some form of policing system to detect criminals, plus a judicial system to impose punishments deemed appropriate for particular crimes. Both these systems are deliberately kept independent of the actual victims of crime, and you might ask yourself why this is important.

However, it is not quite so simple as that, because the criminal code often changes, and what is a particular crime at one moment in history may be legal in another.

Furthermore, a criminal activity in one part of the world may not be criminal in another. For example, male homosexuality was a criminal offence in Britain until the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 decriminalised it, while it is still illegal in 67 countries today, sometimes attracting very severe punishment. Another example is how in Britain, an individual could stand on a soapbox in Hyde Park and roundly criticise the government with impunity; they would do that in Gorky Park in Moscow at the risk of a long prison sentence for a crime against the state. Along with philosophers over the ages, you might wonder how particular governments and legislators agree on what is to be counted as a crime.

The articles in this workshop illustrate several cases of how difficult it can sometimes be to decide whether a particular action should be called a crime. Links, questions, and suggested exercises will help you think carefully about the answer in each case.

We also include the first of four pieces about understanding and developing your critical thinking skills – how to acquire and evaluate reliable evidence in this age of so much biased reporting and false news.

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Crime in times of war: The moral implications of the atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki PHYSICS AND PHILOSOPHY Author: Jimmy Brewer, Mathematics Graduate, St Hilda’s College, Oxford

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n the 6th and 9th of August 1945, the United States of America dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tens of thousands of civilians were killed instantly, and many more died from radiation poisoning days and months after the blast. According to the UN, ‘intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population’ is a war crime.

Admittedly, this definition is from 1949, made in response to the horrors of the Second World War, including the use of atomic bombs.

But it was known well before 1949 that it was a crime to murder tens of thousands of civilians.

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he crime of mass murder, being unjustifiable, is often defended

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even more strongly by those who committed it; recently, the blockbuster Oppenheimer has brought arguments for the use of nuclear weaponry to public attention. Before getting stuck into this, let’s examine some of the science behind it.

The science behind nuclear weaponry: At the heart of nuclear weaponry is the idea of ‘splitting the atom’. When the nucleus (the centre) of an atom is split, it releases energy, which is used in nuclear weapons to create an explosion. The nucleus of an atom is made up of protons and neutrons. The number of protons determines the type of element it will be, like carbon, lead or copper.

The number of neutrons for a given element may vary, and an atom with a specific number of neutrons is called an isotope. For example, Carbon-12 and Carbon-14 are two isotopes of carbon, with 6 and 8 neutrons respectively (the ‘12’ and ‘14’ refer to the total number of protons + neutrons). In nuclear weapons, uranium-235 and plutonium-239 are the isotopes most used.

When a neutron is fired at one of these isotopes, it can trigger its nucleus to split (this is known as nuclear fission). This releases energy, and excess neutrons, which can hit neighbouring atoms and 7

trigger fission in them too. If there is a sufficiently large mass of the isotope, known as its critical mass, it triggers a chain reaction, and a very large amount of energy is produced.

Nuclear weapons use this energy to create a devastating explosion.

This, in brief, is the science behind nuclear weapons. From here, let’s approach the issue of the atomic bomb from a different angle, looking at an argument used to justify its use in Japan and reflecting on ideas underpinning it.

Firstly, it is important to note that this is not just a question of the United States’ guilt - whether they had good reason to drop the bombs. It

How fragile human handwriting seems when it guards the lives of thousands!

Imagine yourself there; people from all sides, each arguing for their own version of justice, and with no hindsight to look back on. Questions, once merely theoretical, leap to life as they inform actual decisions about actual bombs.

Fortunately for humanity, the third bomb was never dropped. Yet the memo highlights how narrowly it was avoided. Could the second bomb have been avoided too? The first? is also one that could have decided if a third bomb was to be dropped. There is a memorandum dated 10th August 1945 from Leslie Groves, director of the atomic bomb project, to the War Department chief of staff, explaining that another bomb would be ready for 17 August. Scrawled at the foot of this note, in spidery and worryingly illegible hand, is a warning from the chief of staff that another bomb ‘is not to be released over Japan without express authority from the President.’

Then and now, a notable argument for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that it ensured a quick Japanese surrender, which saved more lives than were lost in the explosions: more people, it is argued, would have died had the bombs not been dropped. You can look at this argument using evidence from the time to help decide if the claim is true. Here are some things you could think about:

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■T he argument is based on

estimates of future casualties. Are these plausible?

■I f the estimates were made by American scientists about the deaths of American troops, might they not be biased?

■S hould the lives of civilians and the lives of soldiers be valued equally?

■T o what extent can the actions of a country in a time of war be held up to peacetime standards?

Another way to look at the argument is to take it apart at an earlier stage by looking at the thinking which underpins it.

Underlying the argument is a utilitarian assumption. Firstly, what is utilitarianism? It is the belief that the goal of an action is to bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number. If there are four pears, and Ally and Biff both want as many pears as they can, then the utilitarian approach gives Al and Biff two pears each. Why? The key is to spread the pleasure as equally as possible. If you had given Ally, say, three pears, then he would have been happier than Biff with one pear. This violates the utilitarian principle, since happiness is not equally distributed among the population; Ally is happier than Biff.

In the argument for the atom bomb, utilitarian thinking is being used to justify the murder of 120,000 people, because doing so would supposedly save, say, 150,000 lives in the future. So, an underlying assumption of the argument is that utilitarian decision-making is the ‘right’ way of thinking. It buries certain questions you might have, by framing the problem in a way that reduces the whole problem to a ‘liveslost’ calculation.

Have you say You can bring the assumptions themselves into question, too. Here are some things you could think about and add your ideas to the discussion forum: ● Is it right to extend the ‘happiness arithmetic’ of utilitarianism to a judgment concerning human lives? ● What might happen if all decisions were made this way? ● Can all decisions be made this way? ● Since it is impossible to know the future, can any decisions be made this way?

If these questions seem a bit abstract, try thinking of a decision you’ve made in your own life, and considering how you have (or haven’t!) used utilitarian thinking to resolve it. If questions like the last one make it seem impossible to make any decision with certainty, it is useful to remember that in real life, actual decisions do in fact get made, even ones as momentous as the dropping of the atom bomb. A point occurs when the competition of abstract ideas is cut off by real necessity.

The decision to drop two atomic bombs over Japan in 1945 scarred a nation, and arguments for and against it are still compelling subjects for debate today. The business of constructing a nuclear weapon is highly technical and favours methodical, clear-cut reasoning.

The same reasoning, however, is apt to turn the question of actually using the thing into a game of lives lost versus saved. Whether this is essential simplification, or bloodless inhumanity, is a question I leave to you.

Think piece: Physics ● T he isotopes most commonly used in nuclear weapons are uranium-235 and plutonium-239. Why are these used, and other isotopes not? ● Using a periodic table, identify what element and isotope the following atoms are: Example: 6 protons 8 neutrons is carbon-14 • 1 proton 1 neutron • 7 protons 8 neutrons • 92 protons 143 neutrons Can you find notable properties of each isotope? For example, carbon-14 is used in carbon-dating?

Philosophy ● Watch this short video. In it, they describe utilitarianism as ‘the only moral framework which can be used to justify military force or war’. Think why this might be the case?

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If you want to find out more: ● Here is a clear, thorough explanation of the technology used in nuclear weapons.

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● Here is a look at carbon-14 and its role in carbon dating.

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● Here is a short video recap of utilitarianism LINK

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Can a Machine Commit a Crime?

PHILOSOPHY AND TECHNOLOGY Author: Dr David Lee, Philosophy Tutor, St John’s College, Oxford

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Can a machine commit a crime?

n March 2018 in Tempe, Arizona, 59-year-old Elaine Herzberg had the dubious privilege of being the first pedestrian to be killed by a selfdriving car. This unfortunate incident raises both specific questions about the event itself and more general ones about the relationship between technology and moral responsibility.

Can a machine commit a crime, and if so, how does this influence our attitudes regarding blame and punishment? Does it make sense to treat a machine as a culpable agent in someone’s injury or death?

Developments in technology challenge familiar assumptions and raise questions that are not easy to answer.

In this particular collision, there was plenty of blame to go around.

Elaine Herzberg, slowly pushing a bicycle laden with shopping bags on a dark night, had taken an unsafe shortcut over a busy freeway rather

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than making the longer detour to use an illuminated pedestrian crosswalk. The state of Arizona had taken the controversial decision to license the use of experimental selfdriving technology on public roads, despite concerns about its readiness.

The car’s sensors misidentified the sizeable object detected on the road as a vehicle. A human backup safety driver was distracted by streaming a television show on a mobile phone and subsequently accepted a criminal endangerment charge. A National Transportation Safety Board report criticised Uber, the developers, for an inadequate safety culture and for abandoning an earlier requirement for two human monitors. Uber’s permit to test autonomous vehicles in Arizona was later withdrawn, and the development programme was abandoned.

This abundance of fault tended to distract attention from the role of self-driving technology rather than bringing it into focus. But serious incidents of this kind are bound to occur more often, and it may not always be easy to trace the blame to human failings.

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Machines can be responsible for harm by facilitating or making possible events that would not otherwise happen.

In the United States, ordinary vehicles cause tens of thousands of deaths on the roads every year. But we tend not to think of machines as responsible in a deeper sense, in the way that we associate intent or negligence on the part of living agents with punishable offences. Rather, we typically think of machines – even relatively sophisticated computercontrolled technological systems – as tools directed towards certain purposes by human users.

In cases where machines work as expected by a sufficiently attentive agent, we take the responsibility to lie with the user.

In cases where machines fail to do what they are supposed to, or act unexpectedly, we might investigate the possibility that the designer or manufacturer is at fault for failing

to uphold sufficient standards or anticipate an eventuality that could reasonably have been foreseen. But what circumstances would prompt us to apportion blame directly to a machine?

Self-driving cars use an algorithm that gathers information about the environment, accepts an input destination or objective, and yields an output regarding driving behaviour.

As with a human driver, the output is adjusted depending on assessments of acceptable risk and the relative importance of alternative outcomes.

These decision-making procedures are often explicitly programmed into the car’s software. The Arizona car was designed to detect pedestrians and avoid collisions, although emergency braking was left to a human monitor.

However, explicit instructions are increasingly giving way to an alternative. Manual programmes are being superseded by machine learning approaches, through which artificial neural networks employ advanced statistical techniques to model their own algorithms from massive amounts of data. Although such systems can dramatically outperform their traditional counterparts, there is a trade-off.

While we can observe the inputs and outputs of such systems, their precise internal workings are usually unknown, and their decision-making processes are vastly too complex to be traced in detail. This makes them seem less like tools designed for a purpose and more like autonomous agents forming their own intentions.

It seems likely that the future self-driving cars will run on such self-extrapolated instructions, behaving in ways no human designer has stipulated. They may offer considerable safety improvements, cutting fatalities to a fraction of

those involving human drivers. But in the event of apparently deliberate behaviour that causes harm, can we continue to insist that the machine has no agency? Our current conviction that we must have a case of human culpability or sheer accident

may come under considerable strain.

Unfamiliar technology presents us with new questions. We will need to find a way to answer them.

WHAT HAVE OUR PREVIOUS CRITICAL THINKERS SAID?

Have you say Do you think that self-driving cars should be understood as having their own agency? Add your comments to the chat box.

Super challenge: Come up with three moral scenarios to do with driving. For example, if you were in a situation where you could either hit an older lady crossing the road or swerve to avoid her and run over a child, what would you do? Think about the moral dilemmas brought up in the further resources. Survey your friends and family, asking them what they would do in response to these situations. Try to ask as many people as possible, to get a bigger sample size.

Hint: Try to think of situations that are morally ambiguous – ones where you would struggle to make a decision. This is the best way to reveal the nuances between different people’s moral decisionmaking.

If you want to find out more: Article: ‘Major legal changes needed for driveless car era’ LINK

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Article: ‘Self-driving car dilemmas reveal that moral choices are not universal’ LINK > Article: Driverless cars and AI Ethics’ LINK > 12

“ My advice to those slightly unsure about taking part in the programme would be to just go for it. It may seem intimidating, but it will prove so helpful for the whole application process. And there are even prizes up for grabs for the various tasks!”

E brahim Jadama, Former Inspire 12 and 13 Student and current St John’s Student

“ I really appreciated the group tasks which provided verbal communication. these allowed me to come out of my comfort zone.” “ I really liked how we were given the opportunity to learn about topics that we may not have been introduced to before.”

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Critical Thinking Skills Assessing Credibility Authors: Alfred Dry, Human Sciences graduate, St John’s College Oxford; Lily Middleton-Mansell, English Literature graduate, St John’s College, Oxford

A unicorn?

In St John’s?

It is easy to read something and take what it says at face value. However, an important part of learning how to think critically is being able to look beneath the surface of an argument or statement and evaluate how credible its claims actually are. This kind of critical thinking is key to questions around crime and punishment.

Often, a court case involves one person claiming one thing and the other claiming something completely different: it’s up to the jury to consider how much credibility they think each person has.

Ima Lyer claims that she has seen a unicorn at St John’s College! How valid is this claim?

Assessing Credibility 14

Valid claim?

Watch the video and assess the credibility of her claim. This will give you a toolbox for assessing credibility which you can then apply to the article on bike theft in the UK. LINK

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Assessing Credibility Bike Theft in the UK Authors: Ciara Beale, Fourth Year English and Modern Languages student, St John’s College, Oxford, and Zi Ning Lau, First Year Law student, St John’s College, Oxford.

Bike theft in the UK

BIKE THEFT– A RISING PROBLEM IN THE UK:

SPOTLIGHT STORY:

RESPONSE FROM THE POLICE AND GOVERNMENT:

With a growing number of unsolved bike crimes in the United Kingdom, there have been increased public concerns regarding criminalisation of such theft. Statistics obtained by the Liberal Democrats have indicated that over 90% of bike theft cases were closed without suspect identification, while 1.7% of cases were charged.

Leading the analysis, Alistair Carmichael, the Liberal Democratic Spokesperson for Home Affairs commented that it was “shocking that if your bike gets stolen, there’s verylittle chance of ever seeing the thief caught and punished”. Inhis view, such lack of accountability lies in the fault ofoverworked and under-resourced police forces, as well asGovernment incompetency: “They simply cannot do their jobsproperly without the funding and officers needed toinvestigate crimes like this properly.

Rosie Wetherhill, a 23-year-old bike courier from Leeds, had her bike stolen outside a Chinese eatery.

While collecting an order, Wetherhill had considered locking her bike to a railing before entering the store.

However, she opted for a D-lock, knowing that the takeaway would be quick. Following this, two bike thieves stole her $1,300 e-bike, which disappeared around the corner as she returned. She commented: “I knew I would probably never see that bike again,” .

Having called 999, she informed the police that her bike had a tracking device ,but it was inoperative. The authorities responded by telling her to call them again if the tracking device began working again. After a few days, an officer called her.

She recounts that “He told me that if there was CCTV from the Chinese takeaway, then I would need to go and get that myself because the police were not going to do it for me… It was quite insulting.”

In response to calls for greater accountability, both the government and police have assuredthe public of increased efforts to investigate bike theft.

A Home Office spokesperson stated that there had been more than 15,000 extra officers, with another 5,000 due to be in place.This prediction was issued alongside a statement: “We understand the distress and disruption bike thefts causes victims. We want offenders charged and brought to justice, therefore we are working with partners across the criminal justice system to increase the number of cases being charged and prosecuted, and to speed up the process.”

Similarly, responding to the Lib Dem report on bike theft, a Met Police spokesperson said: “The Metropolitan Police Service takes every incident of bicycle theft seriously andrecognises the distress this crime causes its victims.

We are also aware that for many, this can be a main form of transport and can therefore greatly disrupt their everyday lives.”

Sarah Olney, Liberal Democratic MP “...Home Office Ministers seem content to let tens of thousands of thefts go unsolved every year.

These figures show the ConservativeGovernment is effectively decriminalising bike theft in our localcommunities.”

Sarah Olney is a Liberal Democratic Member of Parliament. She has served as the Liberal Democrat Spokesperson for Treasury since July 2022 and for Business and Industrial Strategy since January 2020.

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can be a main form of transport and can therefore greatly disrupt their everyday lives.”

Oxford Bicycle Theft Crime Volume Number of crime incidents by month from January 2011 to September 2023

OXFORD BICYCLE THEFT CRIME VOLUME

Number of crime incidents by month from January 2011 to September 2023

newspaper Hybrid Magazine the following: ‘Bicycle theft has become increasingly common in Oxford in the recent past, especially after the pandemic. [...] The annual crime rate of Oxford stands at a 237% out of which bicycle theft makes up for 3.4% of it. From April 2022 to March 2023, there were approximately 1.9k bicycle theft crimes, an increase of 10.3% when compared to pre pandemic years.’

Chatterjee writes also that ‘According to Becci, the head manager at Cyclox, (a charity based in Oxford) nearly 345 people whose bicycles they furnished during Covid-19, almost 21% had previously stopped cycling before Cyclox was launched because of the increasing number of thefts.’

Cyclox then clearly has had a big impact on increasing the use of bicycles, which was otherwise hindered by bike theft before the pandemic (and the charity’s foundation).

CASE STUDY: OXFORD AND THE GLOBAL PANDEMIC

Super challenge:

Let us take Oxford as a case study of increasing bike theft in recent years. Oxford is famously a ‘cycling city’ and so is a good representative of the country as whole. According to a graph produced by Plumpot, the city’s bicycle theft crime rate is represented through the graph here.

Assess, with reference to the two aspects of credibility ‘bias’ and ‘neutrality’, the claims made by Sarah Olney and AlistairCarmichael.

An increase can be seen in the final piece of data representing September 2023, demonstrating that bicycle theft is indeed on the rise in Oxford.

Assess the views expressed in “Responses from the Police and Government” through the credibility aspects of ‘consistency’ and ‘corroboration’.

During the pandemic, people were not leaving their houses much at all, letalone cycling, so bike theft decreased in this period as a result; this was the case in Oxford as well as throughout the UK. However, it is on the rise again and has actually increased in comparison to precovid numbers. Chandreyi Chatterjee notes in Oxford Brookes University student newspaper Hybrid Magazine the following: ‘Bicycle theft has become increasingly common in Oxford in the recent past, especially after the pandemic. [...] The annual crime rate of Oxford stands at a 237% out of which bicycle theft makes up for 3.4% of it. From April 2022 to March 2023, there were approximately 1.9k bicycle theft crimes, an increase of 10.3% when compared to pre pandemic years.’

Chatterjee writes also that ‘According to Becci, the head manager at Cyclox, (a charity based in Oxford) nearly 345 people whose bicycles they furnished during Covid-19, almost 21% had previously stopped cycling before Cyclox was launched because of the increasing number of thefts.’ Cyclox then clearly has had a big impact on increasing the use of bicycles, which was otherwise hindered by bike theft before the pandemic (and the charity’s foundation).

Tolpuddle Martyrs

Assess the decision to use Oxford as a case study based onthe following claim: ‘Oxford is famously a ‘cycling city’ and sois a good representative of the country as whole.’

Assess, with reference to the two aspects of credibility ‘ability’ and ‘expertise’, the decision to use Chatterjee’s article from theuniversity newspaper as a source.

SOURCES: BBC News: Almost 90% of bike thefts in England gounsolved The Guardian: Suspect identified in only one in 10 bicycletheft cases in England and Wales

What was the crime?

Sarah Olney: Liberal Democrats Plumplot: Oxford bicycle theft crime statistics Hybrid Magazine: The Cycling City, Oxford facesConstant Crisis

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Loopholes in the Law: How Workers’ Unions were Criminalised for Conspiracy HISTORY

not only did Frampton refuse, he then slashed the rate to just 6 shillings a week. What Loveless didn’t realise is that the population was booming and there were hundreds more desperate labourers who would still be prepared to work for the insulting rate.

Author: Katie Inwood, Year 9, 10 & 11 Inspire Programme Lead

Frampton had the six men arrested. But what was their crime?

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atch a short lecture on the changing definition of crime in the Industrial period here LINK HERE

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In the early nineteenth century, as the Industrial Revolution was well underway, many workers who had moved to the cities were facing the hardship of factory life and the deteriorating living conditions. As rural depopulation rapidly increased during this period, it is easy to forget the hardship of the labourers who remained in the countryside.

This is where our focus turns to the charming village of Tolpuddle, where the majority of labourers earned a weekly wage tending to the land of major landowners, such as James Frampton. The scale and grandeur of Frampton’s estate, in addition to the absence of land for labourers to own, was a constant reminder of the economic divide in the village and thus everyone’s place in society.

Common land for growing crops, grazing pigs or even collecting firewood had long since been carved up with the introduction of enclosure in the sixteenth century. As a starving labourer, the only option was to work

on someone else’s land, with wages being at the mercy of the landowner.

In 1830, this was 9 shillings a week (about £30 today) enough to buy bread to feed the family, but not to pay the rent. In 1833 this was cut to first 8 shillings then 7 shillings.

How did the starving poor respond to these desperate conditions?

Some followed suit of their former neighbours and moved to the cities looking for work. Six residents, however, decided to form a union

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to protect their interests. In 1833, The Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers was created and its members swore a secret oath, promising never to reveal the contents of their meetings. Their aim was to push Frampton for a decent rate.

After all, if he didn’t agree, he could risk losing his workforce.

George Loveless, James Loveless, James Hammett, James Brian, Thomas Stanfield and his son, John, met with Frampton and set out the reasonable demand for their weekly wages to be increased to 10 shillings, confident that he would agree. But,

In court, the prosecution examined the manner in which the group had formed. While there was no law against forming a union, there was pressure to convict these ‘revolutionaries’. The answer lay in The Unlawful Oaths Act of 1797, an old naval law designed to stop mutiny during the start of the Napoleonic Wars. It criminalised taking or administering clandestine oaths uniting sailors. As this was never repealed after the wars, it was manipulated during peacetime to include all secret oaths. Thus, all six men were convicted and sentenced to 7 years transportation to the penal colony of Australia, an alternative to the death penalty and one in which many incarcerated died on the journey. In protest of the judgement, George Loveless argued: ‘we have injured no man’s reputation, character, person or property. We were uniting together to preserve ourselves, our wives and our children from utter degradation and starvation.’ Do you agree with Loveless’ retort that because his aims were reasonable, to criminalise them seems unjust?

To understand why a severe punishment was imposed, one needs to return to the context of mass industrialisation and the effect this

had on the relationship between the rich and poor. The authorities were scared. Only three years prior, four hundred labourers in East Anglia and the south east had burned down hayricks and destroyed farm equipment during the Swing Riots.

The cause of these fears was much larger than disgruntled labourers in the countryside.

Europe was living in the shadows of the French Revolution, compelling landowners and politicians to be extra vigilant for signs of conspiracy.

Furthermore, the creation of the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union in 1833 aimed to bring all workers together to fight for better working conditions, threatening the interests of the elite. Anything that smelt of revolution was crushed. The sentencing of the Tolpuddle labourers succeeded in crushing the power of the trade unions. The GNCTU was broken up and would take another 20 years to recover. However, sympathy for the men was widespread

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across Britain. The labourers were regarded as martyrs for the union rights, sparking campaigns and petitions with hundreds of thousands of signatories demanding their release. It wasn’t until 1836 that the government acknowledged the petition and pardoned all six men.

“We have injured no man’s reputation, character, person or property. We were uniting together to preserve ourselves, our wives and our children from utter degradation and starvation”

How Can a Doctor Become a Criminal?

MEDICINE AND LAW Authors: Azeez Shekoni, 2nd year medical student & Rachel Pindar, 4th year Chemistry student, St John’s College, Oxford

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Negligence or intent?

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Stretch yourself! This article was written to be a little more challenging. Give it a go!

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espite being seen as a prestigious and honourable field, medicine is not totally alien to crime. It is, therefore, important to understand the capacity of medical professionals to commit crimes. Many medical professionals who commit crimes actively aim to harm patients and are therefore sentenced accordingly, however, some harbour no intention to cause harm to their patients but are still seen as criminals in the eyes of the law.

Therefore, a doctor’s capacity to become a criminal is mainly (but not limited to) gross negligence manslaughter (GNM) of patients.

The General Medical Council (GMC) describes the action of convicting the doctors of gross negligence manslaughter to be achieved as long as: • T he doctor owed a duty of care to the patient • T he doctor breached that duty of care

• T he breach caused (or significantly contributed to) the death of the patient • T he breach that caused the death of the patient was ‘grossly negligent’ and, therefore, a crime.

This seems straightforward without any room for interpretation.

However, the problem arises when considering what they describe as gross negligence manslaughter.

When describing, the GMC believes GNM conviction requires a ‘truly exceptional degree of negligence’, in other words, the act must have been ‘truly exceptionally bad’. When considering that the GMC itself uses this phrasing, it casts a shadow on the matter as a whole, with the ambiguity causing conviction of GNM to be on a case-by-case basis. Therefore,

whether a defendant is found guilty is up to the jury’s collective definition of what is ‘truly exceptionally bad’, with different juries having different thresholds of ‘bad’ in the eyes of gross negligence.

Look at the cases below. Ask yourself, ‘if you were part of the jury, would you consider this “truly exceptionally bad” with an appropriate conviction for GNM? 23

CASE 1 Gross Negligence Manslaughter involving a doctor: The 2011 case of Hadiza Bawa-Garba, a doctor who was convicted of GNM after six-yearold Jack Adcock died from a cardiac arrest caused by sepsis triggered by pneumonia, demonstrates the different opinions around convicting doctors of GNM. Several mistakes were made on the ward that night, but Hadiza argued that various factors had contributed to the death: there had been system failings, miscommunication on the ward and she had worked a twelve-hour shift.

While Hadiza was charged with GNM, ten years later she was declared fit to practise after demonstrating the improvements that she had made in her approach to patients.

Jack’s parents expressed their dismay at the fact that she was allowed to work again. However, while Hadiza and her hospital expressed extreme regret about Jack’s death, they also highlighted the difficulties that led to the neglect in care.

Several medical associations have also expressed concern about how the GMC handles cases involving Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) doctors, with figures

caused an overdose, which caused the victim to eventually die. During this episode, the defendant was messaging the victim’s family, mentioning he would get her ‘the right medical’ attention, the prosecution proposed that he did not ‘secure medical assistance as her condition deteriorated to the point where her life was obviously in danger’ and that the rapper was ‘grossly negligent in failing to obtain timely medical assistance, which was a substantial cause of her death’.

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showing that medics from BAME backgrounds are more than twice as likely to be referred to the GMC for fitness to practise concerns than white doctors and that they are more likely to be sanctioned after an investigation. While the ambiguities in the law are important in enabling a jury to interpret gross negligence manslaughter on a case-by-case basis, they also leave room for discriminatory judgements which harshly punish certain groups while allowing more flexibility to others.

Vote now!

Has GNM been committed in this case?

Have your say!

From just a summary of the case, what conclusions do you make? Post these in the forum.

CASE 2 Gross Negligence Manslaughter involving the general public: The case of R v Broughton is useful for understanding the ambiguities in defining gross negligence manslaughter. While Broughton is not a doctor, this case does demonstrate the nuance needed in considering when gross negligence manslaughter is committed in general. The case is influential because it highlights the importance of clarifying causation in gross negligence manslaughter. The case begins in Dorset at the Bestival Music Festival, with the defendant being rapper Coan Broughton with girlfriend and victim Luella Fletcher Michie in 2017. During the music festival, the defendant supplies the victim, Luella, with party drug 2-CP. Initially, the defendant recorded the victim’s reaction to the drug, while supplying more. This promptly

Initially, most people would easily believe the defendant should be convicted and found guilty for GNM. And you would technically be correct because the defendant was initially found guilty of GNM at the Winchester Crown Court. However, you must ask yourself, does that make him guilty of GNM. Because in the case of GNM, the cause of the death plays a massive part in whether the negligence is ‘truly exceptionally bad’.

In this case, how can one prove the intervention by medical professionals would have prevented the death of the victim? Because of the nature of the death (through overdose), it’s difficult to determine whether the outcome would be preventable. Because of this, despite the defendant having a duty of care to the patient (as determined by the original jury), the cause of the death cannot be directly attributed to 24

the gross negligence of the victim.

So whenever considering the conviction of a defendant of gross negligence manslaughter, the clarity of the cause of the death takes a central role in ensuring that gross negligence is what caused the death.

This consideration was also seen in the appeal case, with the defendant winning the appeal and his original conviction being overturned!

Therefore, even though the jury had initially determined his negligence as ‘truly exceptionally bad’, it wasn’t possible to convict the defendant due to the ambiguity of the law, specifically to do with the difficulty of attributing the causation of death to gross negligence manslaughter.

Evidently, many have lobbied for the law surrounding GNM convictions to be changed. However, is this the right way to go about ensuring those who commit GNM are convicted correctly?

Think piece: Have a thought about some of these questions and discuss them with your friends: If you were the law makers, would you change the law regarding the conviction of defendants of gross negligence manslaughter? If not, what parts of the current guidelines do you believe allow the conviction to be correct.

If you would change the law regarding GNM conviction, what new law/phrasing would you introduce?

What does ‘truly exceptionally bad’ mean to you in the case of gross negligence manslaughter.

Be sure to give examples of what you think is ‘truly exceptionally bad’

If you want to find out more This article gives further examples on the case-by-case differences in the convictions of doctors for gross negligence manslaughter. Do you think they deserved to be convicted?: LINK

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Cyber Crime: How much of a threat is it?

MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTER SCIENCE Author: Tom Kemp, Emeritus Fellow in Biology

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Only about 5% of cyber criminals get caught.

“Cyber crime continues to rise in scale and complexity, affecting essential services, businesses and private individuals alike. Cyber crime costs the UK billions of pounds, causes untold damage, and threatens national security.” So wrote the

Case 1: EMOTET: “most dangerous malware in the world” EMOTET is a botnet, which is a group of computers that have come under the control of a cybercriminal organisation. It was first detected in 2014 as a banking Trojan, a virus that once installed steals bank details from Case 2: Cozy Bear: “serious the infected host computer. Infection attack on our democratic with the Emotet malware was institutions” mostly by sending authentic-looking COZY BEAR is a group of hackers emails containing links to websites widely believed to be part of the that, if opened by the user, led to Russian security agencies, who have the malicious software becoming been involved since 2010 in cyber installed. Emotet was subsequently espionage on military, government, upgraded into a Loader, the name energy, diplomatic and telecom given to a virus that behaves like a organisations. By means of a widegateway allowing malicious software net phishing exercise, they send to be downloaded onto the infected out thousands of emails carrying computer. This facility was hired malware. If anyone opens one of out to other cybercriminal gangs for these links, a backdoor is established installing their own malware such into the rest of the system. The as Ransomware, a virus which takes main purpose of Cozy Bear is to over a network and demands payment steal data, especially from high level of money for its release. Emotet is government-related departments. particularly resistant to antivirus These have included attacks on software because it changes its both the U.S. Democratic and the code a little each time it is accessed.

Republican National Committees, It also spreads widely by Outlook with the possible motive of affecting Harvesting, which is when an infected the U.S. presidential election. Other computer is instructed to send out targets have been the Norwegian innocent looking emails to its list of and Dutch Governments, and contacts. At its peak, about 1.5 million an attempt to hack into the UK’s computers were affected, causing Coronavirus research efforts. But

here may have been nothing new about crimes such as theft, fraud, extortion, blackmail, espionage, drug dealing, and planning terrorist attacks, but the advent of the internet and the World Wide Web in the 1990’s generated a whole new class of criminals. From desks in faraway places, they could affect huge numbers of individuals, large organisations and even entire national security systems, while remaining anonymous and facing a very small chance of ever being arrested.

U.K. National Crime Agency in 2023.

“If cyber crime was measured as a country, it would be the world’s third largest economy, behind the US and China.” So wrote the Independent newspaper in 2023.

Over 30 billion records of one sort or another are stolen each year.

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some £2 billion of loss and damage.

In 2021, a multinational effort coordinated by Interpol, managed to invade and take down Emotet’s network. However it was active again within less than a year , armed with even more sophisticated protection, an illustration of the difficulties faced by the cybercrime fighting authorities.

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If you want to find out more: 15 cybercrime statistics you ought to know LINK

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The history and mode of action of the EMOTET malware LINK

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SolarWinds hack explained LINK

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How does password hashing work LINK

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What next?

Hovering on the horizon is the vastly increased power and speed of computers, especially quantum computers. Passwords will become far more difficult to crack, and artificial Intelligence systems will learn to recognise malicious software much better than can humans.

But cybercriminals will have the same increased computing capacity at their fingertips and they will continue striving to be one step ahead. Meanwhile, the first line of defence against all cybercrime is still good cybersecurity habits. Every organisation gives advice about password strengths, extra security measures, and avoiding malicious links, yet too many people are still too careless. The second line is the growing international cooperation between cybercrime fighting agencies such as Interpol pooling knowledge and expertise in pursuit of this international problem.

A metaphor is a common way of helping to describe and understand one thing by comparing it with another that it shares a few similarities with (“the black sheep of the family” or “the city jungle”). The metaphor of an “arms race” is often applied to the interaction between cybercriminals and cyber police. Think about the ways this metaphor helps us understand cybercrime, and ways in which it is misleading.

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password Password Password1 Password123 Password123!

Pa5sW0Rd&123£

Think piece:

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Hacking passwords The key element of most cybercrimes is discovering passwords into files that contain sensitive information such as financial and personal data.

This is most easily achieved by persuading the potential victim to reveal details over the telephone, or through an innocent-looking email or text message. Failing success this way, the password much be cracked, which is difficult but far from impossible. Almost all passwords are converted by an algorithm such as Argon2 from the plaintext entered by the user via the keyboard into a long, randomised string of letters and symbols called a Hash. Hashing is a one way process because a password cannot be retrieved back even if its hash has been discovered. Therefore a hacker has to discover the password by guessing a possibility and seeing if it generates that particular hash and opens the site. If not, another must be tried and so on, a method referred to as a Brute Force attack.

Given the 94 letters, numbers and symbols on a keyboard, it may sound virtually impossible to hit upon the correct password at random. On the other hand, extremely highspeed search algorithms are available that

can test as many as a billion candidate passwords a second. Think how many that is in a month, say. Furthermore there are ways of whittling down the potential number such as using dictionaries of passwords known to have been used. Personal information about targeted users, such as spouses name, birthdays etc. all suggest possible parts of passwords.

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their most infamous operation to date is the 2020 Solar Winds Hack, the largest and most sophisticated cyber attack the world has seen. Thanks to cracking the very weak password, solarwinds123, that had been used by an intern, the hackers gained backdoor entry into a huge business software update company called SolarWinds Orion. This gave them access to the data on the networks of about 18,000 Solar Winds Orion clients, which included such major organisations as U.S. government departments of Health, Treasury and State, and software companies like Microsoft and Cisco.

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The Night Climbers of Oxford: Criminals or Vigilantes?

UNIVERSITY SPOTLIGHT Author: Lily Middleton Mansell, English graduate, St John’s College, Oxford

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ight falls on Oxford. Ribbons of light are pulled from pale stone as shadows cut into the fading sky.

The city eclipses into walls, rooftops and spires, darkness mapped by a hooded figure whose deft movements across the very edges of the buildings transform their silhouettes into solid terrain.

Even in daylight, the University of Oxford maintains something of a mystical air. The architectural display of its colleges and libraries teases tourists with a sense of the treasures within. Like mythical beasts, their buildings swallow secrets. The Radcliffe Camera crouches over its hoard of books and, preserved in an urn in its chapel, St John’s College beats with a real human heart. Talk of tunnels beneath the Bodleian pulls focus further: look within, below, below. But, as night blocks out the windows and passages, the gaze of one group drifts upwards. The Night Climbers of Oxford are interested in the city’s untouched summits.

The exact date that the Night Climbers were founded remains unknown, but the tradition of scaling the city’s buildings dates back to the 1930s. Revived in the 21st century, alongside their counterpart

in Cambridge, the Night Climbers of Oxford are a secret society who specialise in feats of urban climbing and parkour. They operate in darkness in order to avoid detection by the University authorities, who have banned such architectural expeditions. The group is therefore shrouded in a sense of criminality.

In a 2019 interview with the Isis, one of Oxford’s student magazines, an anonymous climber explains the legal fine line that their journeys tread:

Library. In the 1930s, during his undergraduate degree, he stole the weathervane from the Christopher Wren Sundial in All Souls College.

But when he was later elected a fellow of All Souls, he climbed back up and replaced it. Its absence was never noticed. The Night Climbers are known for these kinds of antics, which involve risk but technically do no harm. They raise questions about the divide between crime and mischief:

‘Technically what we do isn’t criminal, and it’s actually classed as a civil offence instead. Unless damage to property occurs, we can’t be arrested for our acts. We’re always very respectful of the buildings which we climb, and we never invade the rooftops of private homes.’

are the Night Climbers simply indulging in harmless fun, or do they pose a danger not only to the university buildings, but also to themselves?

Boundaries such as these - no damage, no private homes - means that the Night Climbers’ feats just teeter on the edge of criminality.

David Cox, a historian and climber, was one of the first to scale the Radcliffe Camera and the Codrington 30

However, there is another, more purposeful, element to the Night Climbers’ expeditions. Some may associate them, not with mischief or petty crime, but rather with the work of vigilantes. While the identities of the current Climbers remain a mystery, they have recently begun to speak to the public, largely through Oxfess, an anonymous Facebook confession page for Oxford students.

These posts - which are often long, winding, poetic meditations on the city of Oxford and the meaning of life - incorporate political comment alongside philosophical accounts of their climbs. In their Isis interview, the anonymous Climber presents the very criminality associated with night climbing as a means to social change: ‘Night climbing is controversial in nature, and controversy incites interest and promotes change.’ This is a key principle of protest. The Night Climbers often use their public status

to speak out against homelessness and inequality, as well as showing their support for social movements.

In 2018, these hooded figures emerged at night to litter the upper walls of the Radcliffe Camera with traffic cones which, during Oxford Pride week, were decorated with LGBTQ+ flags.

But the Night Climbers make no claim to saving the world. Despite their hoods and their cloaks of darkness, they are by no means heroes. Rather, their existence speaks to an aesthetic conception of Oxford that draws both students and tourists into the city’s thrall. The buzzword today is dark academia, but its appeal dates back to the early twentieth century. Perceptions of the Night Climbers feed into the sense of intellectual mystery that surrounds both Oxford and Cambridge, an anticipation of deep knowledge, a conception of academia as pure

‘Have your say!

D o you think the Oxford

Night Climbers are in the wrong?’

Concerns have been raised about the risks associated with urban climbing.

The ancient buildings targeted by the Night Climbers, some built as far back as the fifteenth century, were not made with rooftop-dwellers in mind, and the group has little care for ropes or safety equipment. One is reminded that many laws are made to protect you from your own unsafe choices, rather than from harming anyone else.

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curiosity that drives a perilous journey into the heart of ancient tradition, boundaries broken through leaps across crumbling stone and rising walls, peaking to a point of pure potential. This vision of Oxford is, of course, a fantasy. But, not unlike the criminality surrounding the Night Climbers, it is arguably a harmless one - and one that helps foster not only an interest in but also an emotional connection to the learning enclosed within Oxford’s walls.

As one Oxfess by the Night Climbers declares: ‘Romanticising what we do is challenging,

after all we are outlaws and therefore renegade by nature.

Conveying our tales of escapades and escapes, as well as our perpetual cat and mouse game with the university authorities in a light-hearted manner is more arduous still. [...]

I dream of the day where men and women, whether they be students, locals, or travellers, can come to this place and utilise it as a gigantic urban playground. Where they can explore not just their physical and mental fortitude but can give their lives perspective and focus.’ The city’s buildings give foundation to the fantasies of its residents. In all absurdity, its spires can seem to hold their hopes and dreams. The Night Climbers endeavour to reach these hopeful heights in the most literal sense, fostering a brick-and-mortar bond that can only be emotional: ‘I have fallen in love with Oxford and I can’t see myself ever leaving until my ambition is fulfilled.’

What does it mean to be innocent?

Justly punished for a crime not yet committed?

PHILOSOPHY

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Author: Professor Nick Jones, St John’s College

VOTE NOW Is it a crime if it hasn’t yet been committed?

Tomorrow ...

Guilty?

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his essay summarises some ideas in Alex Kaiserman’s 2023 article “What’s wrong with prepunishment?”

Joe is in prison. Unlike the other prisoners, Joe hasn’t committed a crime. Nobody even suspects him of having committed a crime. Not the police, not the judge, not the jury, and certainly not Joe himself. And they’re all right: he hasn’t committed a crime. But when he’s released tomorrow, Joe’s going to get in his car, head straight for the nearest empty motorway, and break the speed limit by more than one hundred miles per hour. That’s why he’s in prison. The police, the judge, the jury, and Joe all know that’s what he will do. He’s being punished today for a crime he hasn’t yet committed but which everyone knows he’s going to commit tomorrow. To give it a label: Joe is being pre-punished.

This story isn’t real. Our justice system doesn’t work like that. People can be punished for crimes we know they have already committed. People

can’t be punished for crimes that haven’t been committed, even if we know they really are going to commit them. But suppose the law were changed to permit pre-punishment.

Would there be anything morally wrong about Joe’s case then?

I’m going to take a brief look here at various reasons why prepunishment isn’t ever morally permissible. Think of this as a challenge. If you think there’s something wrong about prepunishment, can you say what that something is? Why does that make pre-punishment wrong whereas normal punishment is sometimes permissible? Or are you prepared instead to accept that pre-punishment may not be so bad after all?

Joe’s case is unrealistic, since you can’t know today that Joe will speed tomorrow.

That seems too strong. We often do know what people will do in the future. Let’s assume we know that Joe really wants to speed tomorrow, that he’s made no secret of his plan, and that nothing will prevent him from speeding excessively when he decides 33

to do so. Then we know Joe will speed tomorrow.

Joe is innocent. We shouldn’t punish the innocent. So, we shouldn’t punish Joe. What is innocence? Perhaps innocence is just not having yet committed a crime. Then this reason is unpersuasively circular. It relies on the claim that we shouldn’t punish the innocent, i.e., those who haven’t yet committed a crime. But that’s just what’s currently under investigation.

The point of punishment is to deter people from crime. Yet since we know Joe will speed tomorrow, pre-punishment now won’t prevent any crime.

Deterrence is one reason for punishment, but not the only one.

Punishment is also about ensuring that people receive what they deserve, given how they behave. If you do bad, you deserve punishment regardless of whether anyone will ever know about it or be deterred by it.

This doesn’t seem right. If you volunteer to help out tomorrow, you deserve praise today. Moreover, the praise is for helping not merely volunteering, since the praise will turn out to have been undeserved if you don’t in fact help when tomorrow comes. What goes for praise here seems to go for punishment in Joe’s case too.

Even though Joe will speed tomorrow, he could still choose not to.

Note first that if Joe couldn’t choose not to speed tomorrow, pre-punishment today might still be permissible. According to some views about the laws of nature, what happens in the future is completely determined by what happened in the past. If so, then pre-punishment might be permissible whenever someone will commit a crime at any future time.

More pressingly though, “could” in what sense? Holding fixed my current level of fitness, I couldn’t complete a 100-mile race. But allowing for the possibility that I devote myself wholly to training for the next five years, I could complete a 100-mile race. Two different senses of “could”, corresponding to two different ways of holding some facts fixed and allowing others to vary. What should be held fixed when deciding whether Joe really could choose not to speed

tomorrow? What makes some facts better than others for this purpose?

It’s not clear that these questions have good answers. Thankfully, answers are not required if pre-punishment of Joe today is permissible because here in our actual course of history he will speed tomorrow (and we know he will), even though in some other possible course of history (not our own) he won’t speed tomorrow.

Pre-punishment opens up the possibility of the punishment causing the crime, and punishment is not permissible when it causes the crime.

That sounds plausible. Suppose Joe’s pre-punishment so enrages him that when released he speeds anyway.

Then the pre-punishment caused the crime. But even if he hadn’t been pre-punished, the same crime would have occurred anyway, just with a different cause. Joe’s pre-punishment affects why he committed the crime not whether he did. Since the crime occurs either way, with or without prepunishment, the fact that it caused the crime doesn’t automatically seem to make the pre-punishment wrong.

Time to wrap up. I’ve considered what seem to me some of the best reasons for thinking that prepunishment is always wrong. I don’t find any of them persuasive. What do you think?

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After reading the article, Is it a crime if it hasn’t yet been committed?

Computer or human?

VOTE NOW

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You can only deserve things because of what you’ve already done, not what you will do.

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Experimenting with Artificial Intelligence: How Does ChatGPT Compare With Human Writing?

Super Challenge:

CLASSICS AND TECHNOLOGY Author: Dylan Worsley and ChatGPT

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elow is an article that has been generated by ChatGPT (an AI chatbot able to answer questions and hold conversations) and then lightly edited by an Oxford student. ChatGPT works by mining information from the internet, which means that there is no guarantee that the information contained in this article is accurate.

Read the text and think about whether you would be able to distinguish the writing from the other articles in this workshop, and how helpful this piece would be if you wanted to learn about justice in Ancient Greece.

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Unveiling Justice in Ancient Greece: The Transition from Vendetta to Trial Welcome, young minds, to a fascinating journey back in time to the cradle of democracy and philosophy—Ancient Greece. In this article, we delve into the intriguing evolution of justice, specifically the shift from the age-old practice of vendetta to a more systematic trialbased system. Embark on this voyage of discovery as we unravel the ancient tapestry of justice in Greece.

In the early days of Greek civilization, justice was often sought through personal vendetta. When someone committed a grievous act, especially murder, it fell upon the family or clan of the victim to avenge the wrongdoing. Such acts of revenge perpetuated an endless cycle of bloodshed, deepening the wounds within Greek society.

As Greece evolved, city-states known as “polis” began to emerge, cultivating a sense of collective identity and shared governance. The rise of the polis played a crucial role in transforming the concept of justice.

Around the 7th century BCE, the archons, who were appointed officials, 36

began to administer justice on behalf of the polis. These archons presided over trials and became instrumental in guiding Greece away from the vicious cycle of vendetta.

One of the earliest recorded attempts at codifying justice came with the advent of the Draco Code. Draco, an Athenian lawmaker, established a set of written laws in the late 7th century BCE. Although notoriously harsh, the Draco Code marked a significant step forward by introducing a system where murderers were brought to trial, rather than becoming victims of private vendettas.

In the 5th century BCE, another milestone in Greek justice occurred with the establishment of the Areopagus, a council of nobles in Athens. The Areopagus acted as a judicial body, responsible for overseeing trials involving homicide and serious offenses. It brought a level of impartiality and institutionalization to the justice system, further distancing Greece from the age of vendetta.

The ancient Greek tragedian Aeschylus captured the essence of this transition in his play, “The Eumenides.” The play portrays the trial of Orestes, who avenged his father’s

murder by killing his mother. The trial becomes a battleground between the old practice of vendetta, embodied by the Furies seeking vengeance, and the new system of justice, represented by the goddess Athena and the establishment of a jury. Ultimately, Orestes’ fate is decided by a majority vote in a court of law, heralding the triumph of justice over vendetta.

As we bid adieu to the vibrant world of Ancient Greece, we reflect upon the profound transformation from vendetta to a trial-based justice system. The shift represented an evolution of society, where fairness, reason, and impartiality began to take precedence over personal revenge.

The establishment of laws, the rise of judicial bodies, and the adoption of trial by jury all played pivotal roles in shaping a system that aimed to curb violence and promote harmony.

The lessons we learn from Ancient Greece’s journey towards justice remind us of the importance of a fair and equitable legal system in maintaining order and fostering a civilized society. May this knowledge inspire you, young readers, to appreciate the significance of justice and strive for a just world in your own lives.

What a medical journalist thinks of the ChatGPT article: Here is the critical response from a professional journalist on reading this AI generated article. He is no more an expert on Ancient Greek history than you, but he is experienced at judging whether a piece of writing is likely to be authentic.

It seems to be to be very short on detail, and to have lots of glib, unsubstantiated generalisations. I find it very patronising in tone throughout.

The American spelling casts further doubt on the authenticity.

There are too many value judgements, that is, over-personalised assertions, opinions masquerading as truths.

It did tell me something….about Greek law, but the content is absent or unconvincing. Leaving me sceptical about the historical accuracy.

Evaluate the overall usefulness of ChatGPT as a tool for writing articles, as well as considering the moral implications of the way it gathers information. Remember, if it relies on material from the internet to form its answers, then a lot of the generated context will be taken from writing that real humans have produced. Is this a form of plagiarism, or is it simply an extremely efficient approach to research?

ORIGINAL? PLAGIARISM? TRUSTED? USEFUL? EFFICIENT? You should write no more than 500 words.

If you want to find out more: ChatGPT: what can the extraordinary artificial intelligence chatbot do?

LINK

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The professor’s great fear about AI? That it becomes the boss from hell LINK

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Why did the Victorians believe Oscar Wilde was a criminal?

HISTORY Author: Katie Inwood, Inspire 9, 10 and 11 Programme Lead

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scar Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. He studied Classics initially at Trinity College Dublin before winning a scholarship to continue his studies at Magdalen College, Oxford University between 1874-78. He quickly became a highly successful writer, producing the novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and later the play, The Importance of Being Earnest. Though married to Constance Lloyd in 1884, Wilde began an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, a young British poet and aristocrat in 1891. Douglas’ father, the Marquess of Queensberry, was outraged by the relationship and tried to expose Wilde as a homosexual by leaving a handwritten note for Wilde at the Albemarle Club in London. The card read: “For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite [sic].” A sodomite was a derogatory term for a homosexual.

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Until 1967, homosexuality was considered a criminal offence in the UK. While there have been attempts to criminalise homosexuality since the Middle Ages, it wasn’t until the reign of Henry VIII that male homosexuality was a target for persecution after the Buggery Act of 1533, under which those convicted 39

would be punishable by death. This remained in law until 1861 when the number of capital crimes reduced to five, and convicted homosexuals would instead be sentenced to a minimum of 10 years imprisonment.

However, legislation passed in 1885 transformed the definition of a homosexual offence; becoming

known as the ‘Blackmailer’s Charter’ it had a substantial impact on the gay community. In 1895, that handwritten note, left by the Marquess of Queensberry, instigated a criminal investigation and thus a conviction of Oscar Wilde.

The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 was initially concerned with the protection of women and girls and raising the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen. However, there was one last-minute addition which radically changed the situation for homosexuals. Liberal MP, Henry Labouchère, recommended the criminalisation of all homosexual acts (previously it had only been a sexual act between two men which had been made illegal) and a debate ensued for just four minutes before it was agreed upon and thus cemented in law as Section 11:

‘Any male person who, in public or private, commits or influences others to commit any act of gross indecency with another male, shall be guilty… and being convicted…to imprisonment for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour.’

Can you see anything problematic about the wording of this amendment? We’ll return to this later.

Wilde, knowing the damage this note could cause to his reputation (and his freedom!), sued Queensberry for libel. At the time, a conviction for libel carried a prison sentence of up to two years. Yet, Queensberry could avoid this if he could prove his accusations about Wilde to be true. It was relatively easy for Queensbury’s investigators to find a number of people willing to testify against Wilde as well as ‘love’ letters written to men with whom he had relations. The case was dropped by Wilde though was soon followed with

whodunnit Wilde’s arrest for ‘gross indecency’ under the aforementioned Section 11. By May 1895, Wilde was convicted and sentenced to two years hard labour, first in Pentonville Prison, then Wandsworth Prison before being transferred to Reading Gaol in November 1895.

In the eyes of the Victorian court, Oscar Wilde was guilty. Yet, there were many others also arrested under Section 11 on the pretext of ‘gross indecency’, with little evidence and no witnesses, only to be convicted and punished. Why? Historian Peter Ackroyd has pinpointed the ambiguous language used in the wording of the amendment itself, arguing that “there was no distinction between private and public acts.

There was no attempt to define what was meant by ‘gross indecency’.”

With that in mind, Ackroyd believes suspected homosexuals were vulnerable to 40

“any blackmailer or illdisposed person to level a charge against another man without any need for positive evidence or even for a witness… all it managed to wreck were the lives of queer men.”

(Ackroyd, Queer City, 2007) In some cases, it led to suicide.

Cryptographer, Alan Turing, the man responsible for cracking the Enigma Code during the Second World War, was also convicted under the same law in 1952. Despite his ground-breaking work, his conviction stripped him of all honour and was immediately shunned by society.

He opted for chemical castration over imprisonment leading to his suspected suicide two years later.

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What is Crime Fiction?

ENGLISH Author: Lily Middleton-Mansell, English graduate, St John’s College, Oxford

of fiction and the gritty violence of American “hard-boiled” crime writers such as Raymond Chandler.

So what is it that brings all these different works together? Beyond the simple fact of the crime committed, academic John Scaggs identifies the overarching motivation of crime fiction as the attempt ‘to make sense of the here and now by examining the there and then’. This forms a useful parallel with the goal of literary criticism itself.

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rime fiction can be understood as a chimeric genre, a mishmash of different themes, stories and influences, beginning with Biblical and classical myths and moving into modern day industrialism and war. The label ‘crime fiction’ ranges from Elizabethan revenge tragedies (such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet), to Victorian “penny dreadfuls” (an influence on Charles Dickens’ depictions of criminal life), to the detective fiction that gained popularity through the work of Edgar Allen Poe, Agatha Christie’s amateur detective contributions to the “Golden Age”

When examining a literary text, the reader too takes on a detective role, attempting to look beneath the surface of the author’s story and analyse its implications.

Crime fiction therefore both explores how society approaches crime and punishment and encourages the reader themselves to reflect on their own analytical approach to the text.

It calls into question the underlying assumptions about truth, justice and rationality that not only shape our social order, but also our personal way of thinking about human narratives.

The birth of crime fiction is tied to the desire to maintain a certain social order. Audiences learn about 42

the nature of social transgression, and the punishments that may follow, through their striking depiction in the stories of their day. Dorothy Sayers’ 1928 collection of crime fiction, Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror, identifies two Old Testament Biblical Stories and two classical myths as early ancestors of the genre. These stories, with their religious emphasis on correct conduct reinforced by harsh punishment, represent a hope of controlling crime, demonstrating to their audiences the violent consequences that can come from transgressing socially imposed boundaries. In the Biblical story of Cain and Abel, Cain is punished for the jealous murder of his brother Abel by being made an outcast and marked by God so that all may recognise him as a criminal.

This ‘Mark of Cain’ reminds the audience that committing crime will exclude them from the rest of society, as well as reassuring those who follow the law that a criminal is always identifiable as “other” from themselves.

However, more developed examples of crime literature demonstrate the flaws underlying such binary approaches to crime and punishment. Elizabethan revenge tragedies appear to depict the act of revenge as instrumental in the restoration of a social order that

has been undermined by crime. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Hamlet’s Uncle Claudius has usurped Hamlet’s rightful position as King of Denmark by murdering his father and marrying his mother. Hamlet is convinced (by the ghost of his father) that the correct solution is to murder Claudius in revenge. But the ultimate message of the play - encapsulated in its bloody conclusion in which most of its characters, including Hamlet himself, are killed - is that revenge does not succeed as justice. Instead, it only extends the violence of the original crime. The monarchical violence of Hamlet exposes the criminality that pervades the political structures which are meant to uphold the boundaries of law. One of the play’s most famous quotes - ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ - captures this pervasiveness. The convenient separation between a criminal and a law-abiding class encouraged by motifs such as the ‘Mark of Cain’ is exposed as a false binary, one that cloaks the crimes of the political upper classes while villainising those of lower social standing, more associated with a “criminal class”.

The nature of crime fiction changed with the social and economic developments of the 19th century. The rise of capitalism and

commodity culture in the Victorian period resulted in more widespread material wealth, and thus a growing professional class of criminals looking to exploit people’s private property.

Criminal punishment was initially in the hands of the military but, in response to increasing demands for justice, Prime Minister Robert Peel brought in the first policemen (or “Peelers”) with the 1828 Metropolitan Police Act. The police approach to crime was influenced by the Enlightenment (an intellectual movement from the 17th to 19th centuries), which shifted perspectives on crime from an emphasis on faith to an investment in truth, rationalism and knowledge.

Resulting literature, stemming from the Victorian period had a tendency to treat crime like a puzzle, something that promises an ultimate solution.

In 1928, crime writer Anthony Berkeley helped set up the Detection Club, a group of British mystery writers prominent during the socalled Golden Age of detective fiction.

Key to their philosophy was the notion of “fair play”: the idea that crime fiction should always be solvable, committed to the concept of truth.

This association of crime fiction with truth and reason began to falter in the aftermath of the First and Second World Wars. The violence of the wars, alongside the vast social changes caused by increasing industrialism and capitalist economic structures, disrupted the order of society beyond individual instances of crime. As a result, crime fiction started to focus on the decay of truth, 43

justice and rationality as a new state of living, rather than attempting to simply repair social transgressions.

Such approaches are encapsulated by the “hard-boiled” crime novels of American authors such as Raymond Chandler. While Victorian and Golden Age detective fiction was invested in a form of realism underlined by a belief in justice and truth, post-war writers such as Chandler depicted a new kind of psychological realism, one that sought to expose the dark underbelly of society as something that impacts the mind of even the most lawabiding individual. Experimental styles, use of local dialect, morally ambiguous heroes and unreliable narrators are all markers of this socially disruptive approach to crime.

Crime fiction is therefore an eclectic literary genre that depicts a similar kind of investigative thought to that deployed by its critical reader.

While its origins are rooted in a desire to reinforce the relationship between crime and punishment, in order to encourage law-abiding citizens, as society developed crime fiction became increasingly selfreflective, questioning the values and assumptions that form the foundations of social boundaries. It is helpful to use crime fiction as a lens through which to consider the justice of society, but it also functions as a means of investigating your own responses to different narratives, choices and people. When you read crime fiction, consider not only the justice of the text, but also the justice of your own reactions. Are any narratives about crime reliable? Is anyone qualified to make a fair moral judgement about these narratives?

Are you?

Think piece: Watch the following video where Steve Case, author of Criminology, discusses the difficulties of trying to define ‘crime’.

A Brief Timeline of Western Crime Fiction

8th Century BC - 5th Century AD Bible and Classical Myths

Emphasises moral conduct and harsh punishments

Can you find examples in literature of how the definition of crime varies over place and time? Think about whether this literature contributes to prevailing definitions of crime, or whether it calls them into question.

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16th Century Elizabethan revenge tragedies

Revenge was instrumental in the restoration of social order that has been undermined by crime 19th Century Victorian Crime Thrillers

Heavy focus on crimes associated with private property and the effectiveness of the newly created Metropolitan Police Force.

Early 20th Century Detective Stories

Focus on ‘fair play’ and littered with clues so readers can play the role of detectives themselves Mid 20th Century

Focus on the decay of truth and a new kind of psychological realism that seeks to expose the dark underbelly of society as something that impacts the mind of even the most law-abiding individual

Super challenge: Linked below are three poems by Robert Browning, a Victorian writer who was very interested in the criminal mind. He is best known for writing dramatic monologues, a poetic form where a single character, different from that of the poet, makes a speech that takes up the whole poem. Think of it as a theatre monologue, but where the poet is the one playing the part.

Choose two or more of these poems and write a paragraph comparing and/or contrasting their representations of crime and punishment. Think about their relation to different elements of the crime genre. Make sure to include analysis of their form and style.

Hint: It may be useful to read through the poems first and make annotations highlighting as many poetic techniques as you can find, as well changes in rhythm and rhyme.

Here is a link to a glossary of poetic terms: LINK

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Porphyria’s Lover LINK

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My Last Duchess LINK

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The Laboratory LINK

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Introducing…

College Families Author: Lily Middleton-Mansell, English graduate, St John’s College, Oxford

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he University of Oxford is littered with eccentric terms and traditions: matriculation, pidges, vacs, mods, collections, gowns and so much more. But what I found strangest when I started at Oxford was the idea of college families. What kind of cult is this, I asked myself, that categorises students as husbands, wives and children? However, I soon discovered that college families are not some strange ritual, but rather an important way of providing a support network to students both new and old at university.

Just before you start your first year at Oxford, you will likely get a message from people declaring that they are your college parents. College parents are students in their second year who are assigned to two or three first year students to provide them with academic and welfare support throughout their first couple of years in Oxford. You will usually do the same subject as at least one of your parents, so if you have any questions

about the summer reading list, college parents are there to tell you all their tricks. Traditionally, college parents take their college kids to dinner during the first week of term, to make sure that first years know some friendly faces in college. This means that, not only do you have support in the older years, but you also come into university with a ready-made connection to students in your own year, your college siblings.

College families therefore exist to make sure that no student is left stranded in the chaos that starting university can be. You will always have someone to go to if you’re unsure about some element of Oxford life. This goes beyond freshers’ week.

During Prelims, the exams that students have at the end of their first year, it’s up to the college parents to buy their children white, pink and red carnations. These are flowers that students traditionally wear on their gowns when they go into Examination Schools: white for the first exam, pink for the middle and red for the final one.

As you approach the end of your first year, you may start thinking about starting a college family of your own - by marrying one of your closest friends in college. A college marriage is not romantic in the slightest. In fact, there is a taboo against getting romantically involved with any of your

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college family. Instead, it represents the platonic love between two friends who want to work together to support incoming students. Forget nuclear families, college marriages come in all shapes and sizes: there are no limits on gender and plenty of flexibility for size, with groups of three or even four getting married alongside the usual couples. Colleges usually hold a big party in Trinity, the final term of the year, to celebrate the many marriages taking place among the first years. This could even involve the exchanging of rings and vows.

While it may seem serious, it’s all in good fun: college marriages are really about celebrating new friendships.

Your second year at university means that your college family is extending. If you decided to get married in first year, then you will be given your own college kids.

This makes your college parents grandparents, and the family line goes on, spiralling into cousins, aunts, uncles, great-grandparents and more. In second year, you also start giving back to your college parents as they go through the stress of final exams. In Trinity, it will be your turn to give them carnations, and you might offer them whatever welfare support you can while they are revising. College families are a reciprocal relationship, relying upon students giving back the support that

they have received. This allows such support networks to branch on for decades: the family tree just keeps getting bigger.

So, don’t be put off by the strange traditions of Oxford. Often, they are just an eccentric way of describing the structures put in place to support students and make sure that they have the best time that they can at university. Plus, it’s completely up to you how much you participate in traditions such as college families. Some students may go full commitment with their spouses and children, others prefer to choose the single life. But no first year will go without a college parent - there will always be someone there if you need them.

Oxford Spotlight Want to know what a relaxing day as an Oxford undergraduate Is like? Then watch this video LINK

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Author: Lily Middleton Mansell, English graduate, St John’s College, Oxford Want to know about studying medicine at Oxford? Jonathan expands on the article on gross negligence manslaughter and explores how key issues with Medicine and the law relate to daily practices in this video.

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Author: Jonathan Hampshire, Fifth Year Medicine student, St John’s College, Oxford

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COMING UP

49 Inspire Critical Thinking 2023/24

In next month’s workshop we will explore the question ‘are some crimes excusable?’, featuring topics on the causes of crime, the age of criminal responsibility and the types of evidence that can be used in court to change a verdict.

Our Oxford spotlight will shed light on the superstitious ways of conducting trials and punishments, as told through the objects found in the Pitt Rivers Museum.

NEXT MONTH

Key critical thinking skills: Argument Fallacies

Can an animal commit a crime?

Watch our live and pre-recorded lectures.

Learn effective methods of note-taking and active listening.

Ima Lyer goes to court.

You wouldn’t believe how flawed the Prosecutor’s argument is!

SUMMER SCHOOL In the summer all participants are invited to our Virtual Summer School which takes place 12th-16th August 2024.

Here you will be able to choose a variety of academic talks to attend and learn about subject and career pathways at university. You will receive more information on this later in the year!

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