On the Epistemic Grounds of Moral Discourse and Moral Education: An Examination of Jürgen Habermas’s “Discourse Ethics”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is today customary for educators and philosophers to maintain that the learning of certain fundamental normative principles — such as fair treatment, respect for the equality and dignity of individuals as rational persons, the fostering of autonomous and critical reflective judgment, reciprocity of rights and obligations, mutual recognition of informed interests and well-being — comprises an essential form of internalization or appropriation of values that must be aimed at by any genuine form of moral teaching. These principles, it is claimed, are constitutive of the very sense of morality as a normative framework and coming to learn what they mean and do is a requirement of any justifiable conception of the enterprise of moral education. To assert these views is, of course, one thing; to justify them in a noncircular manner is another. The question of justification is philosophically and educationally vital here since we understand the morality of judgment and action to be conceptually linked to the justification of beliefs and conduct in distinctly moral terms. I want to argue here that morality — understood in normative rather than simply descriptive terms — is inescapably and at its core an epistemic enterprise. Minimally, to normatively claim that an action is morally justified is to claim it is the morally right thing to do in virtue of its permissible, obligatory or altruistic character given the circumstances. And to claim moral rightness is to claim that one is justified in making that claim. Hence, to fail to justify the second-order principles and norms appealed to within the justification of first-order beliefs and judgments is to fail to satisfy an essential requirement of both morality and its respectful transmission to others within educational contexts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.079 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".