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Record W2327097147 · doi:10.5840/monist200386323

We Don’t Owe Them a Thing!

2003· article· en· W2327097147 on OpenAlexaff
Jan Narveson

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Monist · 2003
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicPolitical Philosophy and Ethics
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Waterloo
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPhilosophyContemporary philosophyAnalytic philosophyEpistemologyGeneral interest

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The discovery that people far away are in bad shape seems to generate a sense of guilt on the part of many articulate people in our (wealthy) part of the world, even though they are no off now that we've heard about them than they had been before. I will take it as given that we are certainly responsible for evils we inflict on others, no matter where, and that we owe those people compensation. Not all similarly agree that it is not in general our duty to make other people better off, and therefore not in general our fault when people are not better off than they happen to be, even if perhaps we could have made them so by efforts of our own. Nevertheless, I have seen no plausible argument that we owe something, as a matter of general duty, to those to whom we have done nothing wrong. Still, morally commendable motives of humanity and sympathy support beneficence, and if we wish to call those there is something to be said for that, too. I shall, in fact, try to say it later in this essay. A further clarificatory point is in order: I also take it that if we did have any such duties, they would not be, as such, to people who are merely worse off than Americans don't owe anything to Canadians or Englishmen, even though Americans have a higher real income. Our subject, I presume, is people who are, by some reasonable criterion, badly off, and not merely off than we. It is not clear how we would identify this reasonable criterion, but I will assume that there are plausible answers; a duty to needy people, if we had one, would be to try to get them up to that relevant standard, rather than to a condition of equality with ourselves. I will say no more about egalitarianism here.1

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)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.016
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: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.017
Threshold uncertainty score0.057

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.016
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0080.022
Scholarly communication0.0100.011
Open science0.0010.005
Research integrity0.0060.012
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0170.013

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 head0.100
GPT teacher head0.337
Teacher spread0.237 · 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

Citations60
Published2003
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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