Acknowledging Intergenerational Moral Responsibility in the Aftermath of Genocide<sup>1</sup>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article argues for the claim that we are morally responsible (in the qualified sense proposed in the article) for the crimes of our ancestors if our ancestors, as a collectivity, were part of a community for whose sake and in whose name crimes were committed that meet the definition of the crime of genocide. This claim of “vicarious intergenerational moral responsibility” is supported by two arguments. The first counters the claim that one cannot have responsibilities for events in the past by arguing that this claim oversimplifies one's relationship to one's past and the collectivities in which people live. Such collectivities, both ethnic and religious, have identities across time; identification with these collectivities involves accepting certain moral obligations. The second argument is based on the following premise: the political, social, cultural, and educational institutions that mark all large collectivities, such as nations, provide a degree of moral reliability that is necessary for individuals to carry out their legitimate interests. We count on such institutions to exemplify the values that allow individuals to flourish in their life activities. These institutions are by their very nature intergenerational. The moral reliability of such institutions thus requires that we endeavor to acknowledge and repair the damage caused by the failure of these institutions in the past. Accordingly, their health engenders a moral obligation on our part. Vicarious intergenerational moral responsibility is a responsibility not to the past per se but to the past as it plays an active role in the present.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".