The artificial morality of private law: The persistence of an illusion
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the public at large, property and contract law are commonly thought to reflect moral proprietary and promissory rights. Contemporary philosophers are mostly sceptical about natural property rights, though not about promissory rights. I argue at length that contract and promise, no less than property, can only be justified instrumentally – by appeal to the social good that these conventional practices produce. The aims of these practices need not be limited to social welfare but can include social justice and values more closely connected to the subject matter of the practices. The illusion that the law of the market reflects individual natural rights is harmful to public political discourse about institutional design. For example, it leads to ungrounded ideas about a right to freedom of contract and severely distorts the discussion of tax policy. The tenaciousness of this illusion deserves investigation. Promise and property are backed up and enforced by contract and property law. These legal orders necessarily take the form of a set of rules that specify legal rights and obligations. Living our lives in a social world structured in significant part by the law of the market, it is very hard to see those legal rights and obligations as not reflecting a deontological order of moral rights and obligations. We have here a case where misunderstanding the formation of legal normative orders leads us astray in our understanding of moral normative orders. This in turn hinders us in our ability to see clearly what the options for morally sound reform of the legal normative orders may be.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it