MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W2141018876 · doi:10.1017/s0953820809990094

Utilitarianism and Psychological Realism

2009· article· en· W2141018876 on OpenAlexaff
Sophie Rietti

Bibliographic record

VenueUtilitas · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicPhilosophical Ethics and Theory
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Ottawa
Fundersnot available
KeywordsUtilitarianismRealismFlourishingNormativeEpistemologyEmpirical psychologyValue (mathematics)Moral realismPhilosophyPhilosophical realismPsychologyPositive economicsSociologySocial psychologyMoral psychologyEconomicsTheoretical psychologyMathematics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Utilitarianism has frequently been criticized for lacking psychological realism, but what this means and why it is thought to matter varies. This article distinguishes and examines three main relevant kinds of appeals to psychological realism: (a) A minimalist, self-avowedly metaethically neutral and empirically based ‘ought implies can’ approach, exemplified by Owen Flanagan. (b) Arguments from psychological costs and flourishing, exemplified by Michael Stocker and Bernard Williams. (c) ‘Thick’ psychological realism, exemplified by Elizabeth Anscombe, where a conception of human nature does not simply provide constraints on value theory, but forms the substantive basis on which it builds. The main challenge raised for utilitarianism turns out to be metaethical, not a matter of empirical psychology. The question is not so much whether utilitarianism can accommodate (putative) descriptive facts of human psychology as such, but what normative weight these facts should be given and why.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.013
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.015
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.013
Threshold uncertainty score0.069

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0130.015
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0030.049
Scholarly communication0.0080.008
Open science0.0010.005
Research integrity0.0050.008
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.106
GPT teacher head0.306
Teacher spread0.200 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2009
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueUtilitasSame topicPhilosophical Ethics and TheoryFrench-language works237,207