Political and Metaphysical: Reflections on Identity, Education, and Justice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
John Rawls (1985) famously argued that social justice ought not to concern itself with the metaphysical disputes that separate us as groups and individuals. Identity is supposed to be irrelevant to the deliberations of free and equal citizens. Since the recent turn toward right-wing populism, renewed attention has been devoted to the place of identity in contemporary Western societies. In this paper, building on key philosophical accounts of identity, I argue against both political liberalism’s confidence in identity-blind justice and some contemporary conceits of social justice education, according to which identity is the beginning and end of normative judgments. In the first section I show how identity appeals to a notional horizon of authenticity against which specific claims are adjudicated, and which takes on normative significance in its own right. I then consider two examples of recent controversies in Canada over the meaning of Indigenous identity and gender identity, respectively, which reveal latent tensions in the pursuit of social justice. In the final section I sketch the implications of these tensions for school-based education and the role of education in advancing identity talk more generally.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.074 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".