Dying with Dignity in Québec: Palliative Care, Moral Expertise, and the Debate on Euthanasia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On March 22, 2012, the Select Committee on Dying with Dignity of the National Assembly of Québec released its final report recommending the adoption of “medical aid in dying” in the province of Québec, Canada. The majority of palliative care physicians, professed experts in end of life care, rejected the committee’s conclusion. And yet, the recommendation of the committee, in framing euthanasia as “medical aid in dying,” placed the practice squarely within the realm of their putative expertise.The objective of this project is to examine the role of palliative care physicians in the Dying with Dignity debate in Québec and to answer the following question: why were palliative care practitioners unable to influence the outcome of the debate?My methods include a detailed analysis of the committee proceedings of the Select Committee on Dying with Dignity and a review of the sociological literature on committees and on expertise, the philosophical literature on euthanasia, and the historical literature on palliative care.I draw broad conclusion about: (i) committees, and the way in which committee formation and format prioritize certain societal values; (ii) medical expertise, and the devaluation of certain forms of knowledge in the evidence-based medicine framework; (iii) moral expertise, and its presumed absence in Western democratic society.
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 | 0.010 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
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".