Marino, Patricia. Moral Reasoning in a Pluralistic World.Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2015. Pp. 216. $27.95
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this engaging, rich, and provocative book Patricia Marino invites us to think carefully about the practice of moral reasoning and moral theorizing.The central question of the book, she tells us, is "how moral reasoning is best understood in a world with varying moral outlooks."(4) The book also aims to establish a normative thesis: "we ought to strive for … a pluralistically coherent moral point of view that honours various values in appropriate ways and applies those values across the board."(149) Marino's starting point is descriptive -as a matter of fact, she claims, we value pluralistically: "we have a number of common but distinct moral cares … [we] direct those cares at different objects and prioritize among them in different ways."(4) This descriptive thesis, she argues, gives us a prima facie reason to endorse value pluralism and principle pluralism -the view that there is a plurality of fundamental moral principles.( 25)Marino is well aware of the allure of monism -both value monism and principle monism -and the philosophical urge to reduce the number of values/principles to as few as possible.In chapter 2, she considers some arguments for value monism and claims they are unsuccessful.In chapter 3, Marino argues that we have no reason to "prefer theories with fewer and simpler principles."(60) Indeed, according to Marino we have reason to favor pluralistic theories with conflicting principles in order to account properly for the phenomenon of moral regret.
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 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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.058 | 0.016 |
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".