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Record W4225876721 · doi:10.5922/0207-6918-2022-1-2

Categorical Moral Requirements

2022· article· en· W4225876721 on OpenAlex

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.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueKantian journal · 2022
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicPhilosophical Ethics and Theory
Canadian institutionsQueen's University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCategorical imperativeEpistemologyPhilosophyMoral reasoningMoralityAppealDeliberationConsequentialismMoral psychologyDoctrineSociologyEnvironmental ethicsLawPolitical sciencePoliticsTheology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This paper defends the doctrine that moral requirements are categorical in nature. My point of departure is John McDowell’s 1978 essay, “Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?”, in which McDowell argues, against Philippa Foot, that moral reasons are not conditional upon agents’ desires and are, in a certain sense, inescapable. After expounding McDowell’s view, exploring his idea that moral requirements “silence” other considerations and discussing its particularist ethos, I address an objection that moral reasons, as McDowell conceives them, are fundamentally incomplete in ways only a full-bloodedly Kantian appeal to pure practical reason can remedy. I conclude that the objection fails: ordinary moral reasons do not stand in need of a grounding in Reason. There is no prospect of deriving them from a supreme principle of morality or other canons of rationality. Ordinary reasons are sufficient in themselves, though their significance can be elucidated and illuminated by various strategies — some broadly Aristotelian, some drawing inspiration from Kant’s formula of humanity — in ways that can strengthen and vindicate them. Notwithstanding the failure of the objection, I conclude by reflecting on how Kantian insights can yet play a significant role in a McDowellian view of moral deliberation and moral education.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies, Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.873
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0020.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0220.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.116
GPT teacher head0.266
Teacher spread0.151 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it