The role of consequences, comparison and counterfactuals in constructivist ethical thought
Bibliographic record
Abstract
First let me plead guilty to one of the charges that Price aims at constructivists. Although I believe that some of my work has demonstrated the possibilities of moral change in world politics, I have not explicitly articulated a normative or prescriptive position of particular changes as good. And this is the case despite the fact that my students and my colleagues get irritated when I (not infrequently) bristle with moral indignation. The story of why I and other constructivists have not engaged in normative theory is complicated. I don't claim to fully understand it and I don't want to dwell on it here, but just mention a few possible explanations. When I started working on human rights in the late 1980s, the choice of topic alone was a sufficiently normative signal that I felt obliged to spend the rest of my time demonstrating that I was being rigorous in my theory and method. Perhaps I believed that my normative argument was implicit and the discerning reader would know where I stood. Maybe Frost is correct and even constructivists have concealed our ethical stances under a disguise of (our own kind of) scientific objectivity? After over twenty years of doing serious empirical research to document key trends in world politics, I'm still annoyed at being categorised in a recent article by Jack Snyder and Leslie Vinjamuri among those ‘idealists’ who don't understand the ‘political realities’ of world politics.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.121 | 0.108 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.173 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.024 | 0.046 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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".