The Value of Existence Beyond Life: Towards a More Versatile Environmental Ethics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper argues that those that subscribe to “Biocentrism”, specifically the Biocentrism argued for by Paul Taylor, ought to adopt “Ontocentrism” instead. Biocentrism, the theory that all and only living things are morally considerable, fails to account for important moral differences between living things. It cannot justify, without ad-hoc addition, the intuition that a man is worth more than a pig, and a pig is worth more than a mouse. It similarly fails to account for the status of larger systems such as ecosystems, and lastly it fails to account for the status of non-biological entities and artificial life. Ontocentrism, the theory that all existing things, broadly construed, are morally considerable, ought to be adopted because it can account for these things without being ad-hoc and arbitrary.
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".