Productive Ambivalence: Levinasian Subjectivity, Justice, and the Rule of Law1
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The weight of justice hangs on the distinction between consent to obligation and responsibility for what no one would choose. What could this mean? It is often thought that the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas gives us valuable insight into the field of ethics, but has little to offer when it comes time to make the difficult decisions imposed on us by politics and institutional legality. However, if the weight of justice does hang on the distinction between consent to obligation and responsibility for what no one would choose, then what Levinas offers us with his philosophical description of human subjectivity sets in motion a much needed correction to a tradition we might wish to preserve in some of its aspects. That tradition — of liberal rule of law legality and equal rights — assumes that the subject of law and of rights is autonomous and self-sufficient, capable of consenting to take on any duty he or she would bear. That narrative respects individuals and supports liberal ideas about justice but cannot explain to us why we might bear duties beyond our legitimate legal duties. And yet such duties are indelible in our current political landscape: Who is responsible for the refugee, the prisoner of war, the sufferer of poverty or famine, the one to whom I never consented to owe a thing? If we want to answer those questions with any lasting success, we need to amend the theoretical pre-history of liberal individualism, starting with the narrative of subjectivity we inherit from that tradition. This chapter will set forth Levinas’ revision of subjectivity, show its affinity with the tension between formalism and responsiveness we find in rule of law theory and practice, and gesture toward a new way to conceive of a liberatory form of individualism, all for the sake of justice. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.088 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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.
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".