Contractarian Libertarianism of Jan Narveson. Is It Still Libertarianism?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter aims at presenting and scrutinizing a contractarian approach to libertarianism, which has been proposed by a Canadian philosopher, Jan Narveson, known as the main proponent of so-called contractarian libertarianism. The chapter begins with the short introduction followed by “Assumptions,” discussing Narveson’s understanding of morality, his critique of Rawlsian methodology and his view on natural law and natural rights. Afterwards, “Social contract: justification, procedure, motives” presents such elements in the philosophy of Narveson as advantages of contractarianism, levels of the social contract and its status, as well as motives of parties being subject to the social contract. The third part, entitled “Critics vs. Narveson” touches on a critical discussion of the subject by other theorists (Tibor R. Machan, John T. Sanders, Leo Groarke). The last section, “Is the Contractarianism of Narveson Libertarianism?” presents the thesis that Narveson’s contractarianism is not a justified basis of libertarianism. Albeit he comes to conclusions agreeable to libertarianism, his philosophy is better labeled as laissez-faire.
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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| 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".