SLAVES, GLADIATORS, AND DEATH: KANTIAN LIBERALISM AND THE MORAL LIMITS OF CONSENT
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Irving Kristol invoked the example of voluntary gladiatorial contests to show that liberalism's commitment to personal autonomy cannot override majoritarian standards of morality. Liberalism cannot explain why voluntary gladiatorial contests should be banned, but liberals know that such contests should be banned. Thus, honest liberals must concede that majoritarian morality trumps consent. Arthur Ripstein argues that the consent in gladiatorial agreements contains a formal defect. According to Ripstein, because both gladiators sanction their own deaths, both reduce themselves to the status of mere things or slaves. On the Kantian view, slavery contracts undermine the personal sovereignty that binding contracts must presuppose, so Kantian liberals can reject gladiatorial contracts and still avoid legal moralism. I argue that while Kantian liberals have cogent internal reasons for rejecting slavery contracts, not all gruesome and deadly contests are matters of slavery. Thus, Kristol's challenge remains intact.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.073 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| 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".