Rethinking the Instrumental Rationality Principles of Fundamental Justice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Canada (Attorney General) v. Bedford, the Supreme Court of Canada fundamentally altered its approach to proving breaches of the instrumental rationality principles of fundamental justice. In response, commentators have charged that the Supreme Court’s new “individualistic” approach makes it too easy to prove a breach of the principles of fundamental justice. This is mainly a result of the Supreme Court’s expanded understanding of overbreadth, which now requires only that a law apply in an arbitrary manner to a single person. The problem with the Supreme Court’s new approach, however, is not necessarily with individualizing the analysis. Instead, upon revamping the instrumental rationality principles, the Supreme Court neglected to ask a more basic question: does the new conception of each principle still meet the requirements to qualify as a principle of fundamental justice? Although the arbitrariness and gross disproportionality principles are still integral to fundamental justice, I contend that the individualized conception of overbreadth has inadequate societal consensus to qualify as a principle of fundamental justice.
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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 | 0.028 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.024 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".