In many discussions I'm pulled back to the distinction between not-guilty and innocent as a way to demonstrate how the burden of proof works and what the true default position should be in any given argument. A lot of people seem to not have any problem seeing the distinction, but many intelligent people for some reason don't see it.
In this article I explain why the distinction exists and why it matters, in particular why it matters in real-life scenarios, especially when people try to shift the burden of proof.
Essentially, in my view the universe we are talking about is {uncertain,guilty,innocent}, therefore not-guilty is guilty', which is {uncertain,innocent}. Therefore innocent ⇒ not-guilty, but not-guilty ⇏ innocent.
When O. J. Simpson was acquitted, that doesn’t mean he was found innocent, it means the prosecution could not prove his guilt beyond reasonable doubt. He was found not-guilty, which is not the same as innocent. It very well could be that the jury found the truth of the matter uncertain.
This notion has implications in many real-life scenarios when people want to shift the burden of proof if you reject a claim when it's not substantiated. They wrongly assume you claim their claim is false (equivalent to innocent), when in truth all you are doing is staying in the default position (uncertain).
Rejecting the claim that a god exists is not the same as claim a god doesn't exist: it doesn't require a burden of proof because it's the default position. Agnosticism is the default position. The burden of proof is on the people making the claim.
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This is all good for legal systems, but I do wonder, how should people carry this out in the public world? Should not guilty be treated in social situations as innocent?
This all reminds me of one of the most irritating feminist memes I saw come out of the third wave feminist revival of 2012 to 2018 regarding high profile rape accusations, usually the kind of he-said-she-said things you'd see on college campuses, adjudicated by the college kangaroo courts and brought to everyone's attention by popular magazines who wanted to take a side. The meme was, "Why should we presume that someone who's been accused of rape is innocent? Shouldn't we instead presume that the accuser is innocent of making a false accusation?"
Fortunately, I think the climate has calmed down in this respect, and I haven't seen such black and white thinking in regards to these issues since then. Maybe Amber Heard had something to do with it, idk.
I don't think so. If Jake is accused of sexually assaulting Rachel and you consider Jake as innocent you would have a tendency to dismiss evidence that Rachel is telling the truth (since people have a tendency to not like to be wrong). Also, people would justly ask you for evidence that Jake is innocent, since you do actually have a burden of proof in this case. And then if incontrovertible evidence comes out that Rachel was telling the truth, you would have been proven wrong.
If instead of considering him innocent you say "the jury is still out", then you are open to evidence of guilt, you don't have a burden of proof, and if Jake turns out to be guilty you would not have been proven wrong.
It's OK to say "I don't know".
A lot depends on the details but in sexual assault there can be an honest disagreement on the facts (eg Rachel could be mistaken, or perhaps Rachel’s subjective view does not comport with objective view).
That is, the world isn’t quite as black and white as you seem to be positing.
There is no "gray prison", there's only prison. In the real world at some point decisions must be made.
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I have come up with this exact point and argument before but I take it in the opposite direction than the feminist meme does. The symmetry of he-said-she-said just means that we should ignore them. Which is a little unfortunate.
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