A Genealogy of the Sin of Sloth - or Why We Neglect Social and Economic Rights (La Paresse du Droit ou Pourquoi Neglige-t-on les Droits Sociaux et Economiques)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper argues that the sin of sloth (acedia), as understood by the Christian tradition, has been replaced by its opposite in the modern world. Sloth, according to Aquinas, is the sin of the soul that does not act for the good in itself, that does not act out of love for God, but rather, that acts merely on the basis of fear or out of a desire to gain benefits. The slothful person was the one who acted (or did not act...) according to his or her own calculated interests instead of acting according to his or her telos. Thus, total inaction from the slothful sinner came from his or her belief that he or she was lost and that nothing he or she could do could save him or her. Inaction was thus considered incidental to, a mere symptom of, one's dispersion of will. The modern conception of sloth tends to reverse this scheme by focusing instead on the unresponsiveness to incentives. Not following one's telos appears to have nothing to do with the modern conception of sloth. Inaction is considered rational if an agent is not subject to appropriate incentives to act (i.e. the potential to gain benefits or avoid losses through action). In effect, acting without the appropriate incentives only means spending irrationally one's energies, it means being wasteful. At the opposite, inaction is considered slothful when the agent does not take positive steps to materialise potential gains or to avoid potential losses. The structure of modern law reflects the inversion of meaning that struck sloth when we moved from the Medieval man to the homo economicus. This inversion of meaning explains to a large extent the attitude that a majority of jurists have about social and economic rights: if those rights are not justiciable, they are not real rights, they impose no duty, people are thus not bound by them, thus, they are not real law. Through a genealogy of the sin of sloth, this paper offers a criticism of this dominant mode of legal thinking.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".