Bibliographic record
Abstract
From the mid-20th century a wide range of philosophical projects emerged that sought to articulate a normative architecture for global humanity—commonly referred to as “theories of global justice”. Yet by the third decade of the 21st century, most of these theories had ceased to correspond to the realities of international politics, drifting instead into utopian constructs. Yet the question remains: to what extent have theories of global justice, as such, lost their relevance? The realities of the world increasingly plunged into a state of disorder demand at least minimal normative requirements to secure basic conditions of safety. This article seeks to revisit the contractarian tradition within theories of justice. Specifically, it engages with the contributions of two key figures: Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century English philosopher, and his twentieth-century intellectual successor, the Canadian philosopher David Gauthier. The analysis explores the extent to which a Hobbesian approach—further developed by Gauthier—can be applied to the formulation of a global theory of justice, examining both its strengths and its weaknesses. The results of the inquiry must be judged unsatisfactory: in the absence of a global sovereign—a Hobbesian requirement—and in the absence of the rational agency presupposed by Gauthier as a condition of contract-making, the construction of a global normative framework proves unattainable. The final part of the article attempts to analyse what transformations in world order might render contractarian theories operational at the global level. Then, in conclusion, the results of the entire work are summarised.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".