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Record W4417157076 · doi:10.1007/s10677-025-10531-x

On Scepticism About Intergenerational Legitimacy

2025· article· en· W4417157076 on OpenAlexfundno aff
Emil Andersson

Bibliographic record

VenueEthical Theory and Moral Practice · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicClimate Change and Geoengineering
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersUppsala UniversitetVetenskapsrådetMcGill University
KeywordsSkepticismPhilosophy of medicineLegitimacyPolitical philosophyRelevance (law)Ontology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Most of us believe that future people – i.e., people who do not yet exist, but who will exist in the future – are directly relevant for questions of justice. Most of us also believe that those who rule should not only rule justly, but also legitimately. This invites the question: if future people matter for what counts as ruling justly, is the same true for ruling legitimately? Though it has recently been argued that future people matter for determining what is legitimate in the present, there appear to be reasons for scepticism about this possibility. It can be argued that our inability to rule future people makes it the case that we cannot act (il)legitimately towards them, and that therefore they are not directly morally relevant for what counts as ruling (il)legitimately in the present. This paper is devoted to responding to this sceptical challenge. I argue that even if we cannot act (il)legitimately towards future people, they might nevertheless have direct moral relevance for what is (il)legitimate in the present. Hence, the question of who we can act (il)legitimately towards settles no important questions on its own. This result has significant implications for the general question of how future people may feature in our theories about political legitimacy.

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)0.033
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.061
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 score0.033
Threshold uncertainty score0.173

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0330.061
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0030.002
Science and technology studies0.0060.105
Scholarly communication0.0100.013
Open science0.0030.007
Research integrity0.0110.016
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.001

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 head0.018
GPT teacher head0.320
Teacher spread0.301 · 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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