Bibliographic record
Abstract
Kant famously distinguishes between hypothetical and categorical imperatives and the conditional and unconditional necessitation they express. Hypothetical imperatives command conditionally, and they govern our instrumental and prudential reasoning. Categorical imperatives command unconditionally, and they govern our moral reasoning. There is significant disagreement in the literature about how to construe the nature and normativity of Kant’s hypothetical imperatives. In the first part of the dissertation, I consider three, seemingly divergent, contemporary interpretations. I argue, that all three of these views collapse the crucial distinction between conditional and unconditional necessity that was supposed to distinguish between the imperatives. Moreover, on the standard interpretation of the hypothetical imperative’s command, an interpretation that each of these views share, the “material interpretation,” is the logical consequence. The material interpretation understands hypothetical imperatives as deriving from reason’s endorsement of our ends, and thus ends that are set by the categorical imperative. Accordingly, all practical rational failing is a form of moral failing, and so, on Kant’s view, we collapse the practical distinction between stupidity and evil. In the second part of the dissertation, I explain how the standard interpretation of hypothetical imperatives as anti-akratic rational principles that command agents to will the means to their ends, even in the face of any temptation not to, inevitably leads to the material interpretation. I offer an alternative understanding of hypothetical imperatives, and correlatively of Kant’s conception of willing an end, that avoids this view, and which preserves the distinction between the conditional and unconditional necessitation that Kant thought the two imperatives express, and so also the crucial practical distinction between stupidity and evil.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.005 |
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".