Fallacies

On the profound nature and culpability of deliberate omissions.
Deplorable wilful omissions of duty while under obligations of treaties, human right’s act, conventions or codes of conduct.
However you colour it, wilful omissions are merely negatively characterised acts, with a cloak of stealth applied.
Acts or Omissions. Omissions or Acts . Their dependency on the 'mens mentis' or 'mens rea' of the actors.
An omission appears to be simply not an act. In formal notational logic the symbol ~ being used for the term NOT, and the variable P which may be substituted by any valid proposition.
The description of a thing done, an ACT, or deed may be referred to by the variable P.
Where that same act is not done it simply conforms to, not P (~P).
In this form, omissions appear to be equivalents of their counterparts, ‘not acts’ or negatively characterised acts..
Crossing or not crossing a two way traffic road could both be fatal at different times, depending on whether one stops crossing in the middle until a break in the flow appears to confirm it is safe to move forward.
In its simplest form, such acts, deeds or things done, without particular consequence have their counterpart in omissions, as simple acts and simple omissions of otiose value.
Where thought is involved, and that thought has the nature of decision and intentionality, the acts and omissions become substantially more complex. It is the difference between movement within four dimensional space time, and the additional intervention of a thinking mind, the fifth dimension.
Thus,where I cross the road to help a blind person, my intention will be seen as the kind of act, in good faith, that helps to avoid the dire consequences of leaving the blind person to the potential outcome of an accident in dangerous traffic. In the same circumstance, where I omit this deed, with the 'mens rea', that I hold some grudge or hatred for the person and wish them to fall into danger, then the omission becomes a culpable one, more so where I have a direct duty of care.
The difficulty in ascertaining culpability is that of the psycho-physical interaction of the act or omission, to examine the nature of his 'mens rea' at the relevant moment, determining if there was any duty of care owed to the victim. On both sides this becomes an art for the 'omiter' to so cloak his omission as simple negligence eliminating or minimising culpability, and the skill at advocacy in cross examination to illuminate the 'mens rea' that accompanied the relevant act/omission. This is not too difficult for a careful thinker.
Change the situation very slightly and let us say that there is a present clear danger, where there exists such an act P, that its counterpart omission ~P has a fatal consequence on the individual in question. From one living entity to another, such a deed is deemed to be at first sight, a simple omission, or simple negligence. Once one begins the enquiry into the state of mind and intentionality of the actor, one comes close to the kind of omissions I am concerned with in this enquiry.
That class of omissions that falls to a category of such terms as 'he/she simply ignored the signals', deliberately ignored the signals',or the 'signals made little or no impression' are the factors in determination of degree of culpability that now begin to take serious proportion where a person is under some duty of care, such as a parent, person in 'locus parentis', or holder of public office, whose conduct is governed by a code of practice, set of rules or even some notion of tortious liability where negligence is shown to be either wilful or otherwise.
To tease out a poignant aspect of this kind of omission, a parent who negligently omits to take his/her 4 year old child to school, allowing the child to go unaccompanied, due to a moment of perhaps understandable irritation or anger, bordering on schadenfreude to teach the child a lesson, then loses that child in an accident, will live forever after with the burden of culpability that he/she should have been there at such a time when they were not. Under such a circumstance, that parent reveals the true vastidity of the notion of culpability I am pursuing in this enquiry. Though a court may well allow this person to go free, it may be so because the parent is likely to suffer guilt for the omission for the rest of his/her natural life.
It only takes a split second of decision making to pursue a course of conduct that becomes clearly inured to the degree that an examination of that conduct over time, shows it as unvarying, persistence and embodying determination. Such omissions are negatively characterised acts plain and simple. They are as culpable as their identical counterparts who's consequences are of the same intentionality.
We are not concerned with omissions as they seem, or as they may appear, we are concerned with them as they ARE, in their full context of thinking or directing minds governing the act or omission. The temporal aspect of persistent duration makes such determinations of culpability quite simple indeed. In contexts where instant decisions are of little consequence, the duration of the intervention or non intervention makes the ‘mens rea’ more distinct with the increasing passage of time.
At this point the vectors of intervention build on the concept of Newton’s first law of motion, (a derivation of Galileo’s concept of inertia), both derived from a simplistic 4 dimensional universe, which may be reformulated to apply to sequences of events along the paths of destinies in living entities, involving the aforementioned 5th dimension, the psyche. These simple notions suffer from a reduction enabling formal deductions much simpler to realise. A nine dimensional universe is considerably more pliant to more complex notions of causality, 3 for each in space time and consciousness, as discussed elsewhere on this site.
Newton’s 1st law states: Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.
A reformulation to include this 5th dimension would be something like Questor’s analogous proposition that
Every event in a sequence of nomic relationships (causes and effects) tends to follow the teleological path (design or purpose) in that sequence unless an intervention is brought to bear upon that design which alters its goal, and consequently the final result of whatever was inherent in the original design.
The underlying principle for scientific methodology has close analogous bearing with that of necessary and sufficient conditions as simple causes, as in; the presence of oxygen is necessary for the presence of life, if and only if the absence of oxygen is sufficient for the absence of life. Here at first sight is the closer view of the aforementioned nomic relationship, where the presence is necessary if and only if the absence is sufficient. Acts encourage presence and omissions encourage absence of these conditions.
The concept of intervention here is closely related to ACTS as described above, whereas non intervention will be an OMISSION the consequence of which shall permit the normal drift of circumstance inherent in the perceived sequence to continue its path of natural cause and effect. For the purpose of this expose, the notions of free will and determinism are excluded, and dealt with more thoroughly in another section of the site - The Force of Destiny. Thus we are left with the flow and drift of events being malleable to interventions on the part of (thinking or calculating) entities with goal seeking purposes. This is precisely where Acts and Omissions, seen as positive or negative interventions endow upon the ‘designer’ or ‘meddler’, the notion of responsibility and accountability that is a fundamental part of present day jurisprudence, where individuals are held responsible for their acts and omissions, (Human laws).