Themes

Each theme is a claim about the literature, with its dissertation link and evidential profile. Full grid on the Matrix page.

T1-ISOUGHT-OPEN — The field states the is/ought gap but never closes it

At least seven sources independently assert that descriptive data (preferences, folk judgments, legal records, benchmark concordance) cannot by itself ground normative alignment claims - and no source supplies the metaethical bridge; the gap is the field's most-repeated self-criticism and remains open.

supports 7 complicates 3 contradicts 2 silent 44

Dissertation link — Rossian convergentism + wide reflective equilibrium: The dissertation's bridge: corpus judgments enter as filtered CMJs (Brophy) whose evidential weight comes from cross-framework convergence (Ross/consequentialist/contractualist agreement) - closing the gap the field leaves open. Gibbard's expressivism supplies the account of why expressed folk norms carry normative information at all.

T2-PREFERENTISM-BROKEN — Preferentism has collapsed under convergent multi-front attack

Preference-based alignment fails as psychology (preferences are constructed from reasons and values), as decision theory (incommensurability, incompleteness, formal Goodhart results), as training practice (sycophancy is structurally entailed; RLHF alters surface tokens), and as social epistemology (endogeneity: systems shape the preferences that score them) - the critiques converge from independent disciplines.

supports 11 complicates 4 contradicts 0 silent 41

Dissertation link — Gibbard expressivism + reasons-first psychology: Zhi-Xuan's 'preferences derive from reasons and values' is the field's own arrival at the reasons-first picture; the folk corpus's reasoning-annotated data model is the post-preferentist data model the field calls for.

T3-PROCEDURALISM-INCOMPLETE — The procedural turn cannot discharge the normative question

The dominant successor to preferentism - fair-process selection of principles (Gabriel program, deliberative, bargaining, democratic variants) - fails at the encoding step (legitimacy does not survive principles-to-policy transformation), cannot scope its own stakeholders (all-affected gaps), and repeatedly re-imports an unaccounted normative corrective (expert deference, human-rights limits), leaving P4 of the proceduralist syllogism undischarged.

supports 7 complicates 7 contradicts 0 silent 42

Dissertation link — Convergentism as the principled hybrid: Convergence supplies theoretical justification that survives theory-level uncertainty (contra Steingrüber-Baum's justificatory gap), so procedure is needed only for the non-convergent residue - answering Baum's P4 and Schuster-Kilov's fn6 invitation for a third kind of reason.

T4-ROSSIAN-DEMAND — The literature demands Rossian weighing machinery without naming it

Across safety (normative-conflict jailbreaks), design (moral juries, meta-autonomy), review findings (dynamic multi-logic alignment), and formal work (multi-objective incompleteness), the operative need is a capacity to weigh plural defeasible considerations into contextual all-things-considered verdicts - Ross's machinery, explicitly identified only once (Millière) and supplied as a worked account by no one.

supports 10 complicates 4 contradicts 0 silent 42

Dissertation link — Rossian pluralism, operationalized: The dissertation supplies the named machinery: prima facie considerations as plural non-optimized dimensions (blocking Lundgren's loops), all-things-considered verdicts as contextual weighing (Millière's demanded capacity), with Zhi-Xuan's incomplete-preference formalisms and Huang's modular juries as implementation routes; Lloyd's incomparability objection answered by ordinal convergence + theoretic-virtue adjudication of equilibria (Daniels).

T5-AGENCY-DENIED-EVALUABILITY-KEPT — Moral agency is denied while normative evaluability is retained, on assumption

Every tradition applied to current AI (Kantian, analytic-behavioral, continental, virtue-ethical, enactivist) denies moral agency while keeping systems normatively evaluable (constrained-not-accountable; media of moralisation; X-ethicality) - but the load-bearing empirical presupposition (no stable practical standpoint) is stipulated or footnoted, not argued; six empirical instability studies exist yet are never integrated into the philosophical position.

supports 14 complicates 1 contradicts 2 silent 39

Dissertation link — The LLM moral-reasoning experiment: Augustine's experiment argues the presupposition the field stipulates: it empirically tests whether LLMs sustain a stable practical standpoint (integrating the six instability studies), grounding the constrained-not-accountable settlement - and states the revision conditions (contra Manheim's contingency argument) rather than ignoring them.

T6-RESPONSIBILITY-UNALLOCATED — Responsibility is affirmed as distributed and allocated by no one

The alignment literature systematically brackets responsibility attribution (explicit deferrals in Gabriel-Keeling, Kästner, Lundgren); where responsibility is affirmed (Noller's shared responsibility, Dignum-adjacent gestures, IEAI), no allocation mechanism is given; the allocation resources exist scattered (difference-making causation, epistemic/access conditions, principal-agent structure, coercion analysis) but no source assembles them.

supports 8 complicates 9 contradicts 0 silent 39

Dissertation link — Dignum's distributed responsibility + difference-making allocation: The dissertation's Part II: assemble the scattered allocation resources (Kästner's difference-makers, the epistemic/access condition, Hadfield-Menell's principal-agent structure, Steingrüber-Baum's coercion/exit analysis) into an allocation theory, tested against the three cases and the folk corpus's responsibility codes - from affirming to allocating.

T7-AGENTIC-BREAKS-FRAMES — Agentic AI breaks the dyadic pre-agentic frame of every major framework

The canonical frameworks presuppose a live principal anchoring alignment at decision time; multi-step delegated systems break this (context-shaping, preference-endogeneity, collective effects, enlarged attack surfaces, the agency-misuse tradeoff) - and the flagship treatments respond by deferral (collective effects, genAI, responsibility) or containment proposals that reintroduce maximal misusability.

supports 9 complicates 5 contradicts 0 silent 42

Dissertation link — Case-based agentic responsibility taxonomy: The three cases operationalize the breakage: responsibility indexed to agency level (H&D's tradeoff), execution vs outcome wrongs (Baum), situation-engineering responsibility (Ecoffet-Lehman's sequentiality) - the framework revision the deferred questions require.

T8-NONWESTERN-CONCEDED — The non-Western gap is conceded by the field itself

Gabriel (geographic parochialism), Schuster-Kilov (Ubuntu/Confucian limitation), and McKinlay's SLR (Western-canon confession) explicitly concede that alignment theory speaks from and for a Western frame; the acknowledged gap is a standing invitation for African-philosophy contributions, with only scattered responses (Metz citations, Basotho governance chapter, Japanese relational autonomy) so far.

supports 3 complicates 4 contradicts 0 silent 49

Dissertation link — Ubuntu/African moral theory as invited contribution: Metz's relational ethics and the Basotho governance resources (Gouveia Ch53) answer the field's own concessions; the corpus's cross-cultural categories provide the empirical complement - the dissertation's African-philosophy positioning enters through the front door the field opened.