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Record W4413291949 · doi:10.1017/epi.2025.10066

Contractualism and Moral Disagreement

2025· article· en· W4413291949 on OpenAlexaff
David A. Borman

Bibliographic record

VenueEpisteme · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicEpistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
Canadian institutionsNipissing University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsContractualismPhilosophyLaw and economicsEpistemologyEconomics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract This paper focuses on the epistemic significance of disagreement for a specific kind of contractualist (not contractarian) moral theory. I argue that a purely hypothetical version of contractualism excludes a prima facie attractive conciliationist view of disagreement simply because of the way it constructs the moral point of view. There is no room, in such an approach, for rational, hypothetical peer disagreement within the monological deliberative procedure itself. Attempts to supplement this monological procedure with a kind of post hoc appeal to actual disagreement undermine the basic rationale for adopting a hypothetical approach in the first place. An actual agreement approach to contractualism, by contrast, is well-positioned to take disagreement seriously. For such an approach, moral disagreement signals a failure to fully validate or constitute a binding norm, one that may produce – rather than merely result from – genuine moral indeterminacy. Furthermore, as each of our positions within contractualist discourse reflects a defeasible conviction about what could be the subject of genuine, intersubjective agreement among all affected, when we encounter disagreement that is not subject to clear defeaters, we do indeed have grounds to think our convictions may be mistaken, or that we must modify our credences in ways that reflect the risks we consciously run in defending and acting on convictions that do not enjoy justificatory completion.

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.

How this classification was reachedexpand

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)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.905
Threshold uncertainty score0.389

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

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

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 head0.055
GPT teacher head0.278
Teacher spread0.223 · 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

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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