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Record W4414692400 · doi:10.1215/00318108-11964820

A Dominance Argument Against Incompleteness

2025· article· en· W4414692400 on OpenAlexaff
Christian Tarsney, Harvey Lederman, Dean Spears

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Philosophical Review · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicEpistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsLotteryArgument (complex analysis)Outcome (game theory)Ex-anteRanking (information retrieval)Dominance (genetics)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This article presents a new argument against many forms of moral and prudential value incompleteness. The argument relies on two central principles: (i) a weak “negative dominance” principle, to the effect that lottery 1 is better than lottery 2 only if some possible outcome of lottery 1 is better than some possible outcome of lottery 2, and (ii) a weak form of ex ante Pareto, to the effect that, if lottery 1 gives an unambiguously better (stochastically dominant) prospect to some individuals than lottery 2, and equally good prospects to everyone else, then lottery 1 is better than lottery 2. Given modest auxiliary assumptions, these two principles rule out incompleteness in the prudential ranking of individual lives, and many forms of incompleteness in the moral rankings of outcomes and lotteries.

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 machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.018
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.028
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
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 score0.018
Threshold uncertainty score0.097

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0180.028
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.002
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0020.010
Scholarly communication0.0040.011
Open science0.0020.004
Research integrity0.0020.006
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.091
GPT teacher head0.323
Teacher spread0.232 · 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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