Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls produced what remains the most influential account of civil disobedience and, to a lesser extent, conscientious refusal. Engaging with Rawls’s account and seeking to deploy it to evaluate real-world cases are, however, undertakings beset with difficulties. In relation to civil disobedience, first, Rawls defines “civil disobedience” so narrowly (as a conscientious, nonviolent breach of law undertaken with fair notice, fidelity to the system, and acceptance of the consequences to bring about policy change) that no paradigm example from Gandhi to Rosa Parks satisfies it. Second, Rawls’s three conditions for morally justified civil disobedience—that it be undertaken (1) in response to violations of the principles of justice, (2) as a last resort, and (3) in coordination with other dissenters so as not to overburden the majority’s sense of justice or risk lasting injury to a just constitution—impose extreme restrictions on civil disobedience. In relation to conscientious refusal, Rawls’s approach is equally narrow: he sets aside refusals that would be grounded in persons’ private commitments and focuses instead on refusals grounded in public considerations; his central case is selective pacificism grounded in a respect for equal basic liberties (Rawls’s first principle of justice). This chapter acknowledges the argumentative power and lasting influence of Rawls’s treatment of civil disobedience and conscientious objection, while detailing how his account must be refined—and in some ways radically altered—to address real-world concerns.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".