Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper evaluates opposing theories of the relationship between inability and blamelessness in commonsense morality. One theory (the prevention account) is inspired by the “ought implies can” principle in philosophy. On this account, whenever an agent is unable to perform an action, she is blameless for not performing it because she is not obligated to perform it. In other words, blamelessness is explained by the absence of obligation, which in turn is explained by inability. An alternative theory (the exculpation account) is inspired by recent psychological findings. On this account, sometimes when an agent is unable to perform an action, she has a moral obligation to perform it but is blameless for not doing so because she has a legitimate excuse. In other words, blamelessness is explained by a legitimate excuse for an unfulfilled moral obligation, and inability explains the excuse. The results from three experiments undermine the prevention account and support the exculpation account. These results advance our understanding of moral judgment and contribute to ongoing debates in moral philosophy and psychology.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.040 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".