Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This book argues for the prima facie plausibility of the surprising and paradoxical conclusion that there are no moral obligations regardless of whether determinism is true. In the form of a dilemma, the primary argument for this skeptical conclusion presupposes that obligation requires freedom. A minimal number of credible principles entail that this is the freedom both to do, and to refrain from doing, what is obligatory. On the deterministic horn of the dilemma, since determinism eliminates freedom to do otherwise, it imperils moral obligation. On the indeterministic horn, pertinent actions are too luck-infected to qualify as obligations. Hence, there are no moral obligations. The book’s principal goal is to develop the obligation dilemma as powerfully and clearly as possible to inspire sustained philosophical work to solve it (assuming that it can be solved). In many respects, the obligation dilemma mirrors the venerable responsibility dilemma: regardless of whether determinism is true, no one is morally responsible for anything. The book shows that various prevalent moves in favor of, or in response to, the responsibility dilemma are, when suitably amended, not promising as supportive of, or retorts to, the obligation dilemma. Exposing the obligation dilemma’s implications for responsibility, and its ramifications for forgiveness (something central to salutary interpersonal relationships), underscores its urgency.
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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.002 |
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".