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negligence. (
Cambridge Dictionary of
Philosophy, 1995, p. 482
)
The legal concept has no requirement
that the agent be capable of feeling
guilt or remorse or any other emotion;
so-called cold-blooded murderers are
not in the slightest degree exculpated
by their flat affective state.
Star Trek’s
Spock would fully satisfy the mens
rea requirement in spite of his fabled
lack of emotions. Drab, colorless—but
oh so effective—”motivational states
of purpose” and “cognitive states of
belief” are enough to get the fictional
Spock through the day quite handily.
And they are well-established features
of many existing computer programs.
When IBM’s computer Deep Blue
beat world chess champion Garry
Kasparov in the first game of their
1996 championship match, it did so
by discovering and executing, with
exquisite timing, a withering attack, the
purposes of which were all too evident in
retrospect to Kasparov and his handlers.
It was Deep Blue’s sensitivity to those
purposes and a cognitive capacity to
recognize and exploit a subtle flaw in
Kasparov’s game that ex plain Deep
Blue’s success. Murray Campbell, Feng-
hsiung Hsu, and the other designers
of Deep Blue, didn’t beat Kasparov;
Deep Blue did. Neither Campbell nor
Hsu discovered the winning sequence
of moves; Deep Blue did. At one
point, while Kasparov was mounting a
ferocious attack on Deep Blue’s king,
nobody but Deep Blue figured out that
it had the time and security it needed
to knock off a pesky pawn of Kasparov’s
that was out of the action but almost
invisibly vulnerable. Campbell, like the
human grandmaster-. watching the
game, would never have dared consider