A reflection on Cicely Saunders’ views on a good death through the philosophy of Charles Taylor
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In her writings, Cicely Saunders has developed a total framework of caring for seriously ill people. Saunders' reaction to what she has experienced as bad contemporary post-war health care is to be found in her hospice philosophy. In this article this philosophy is analysed through the writings of Charles Taylor. Taylor is a Canadian philosopher who has delivered important views on what it means to live a 'good' and 'authentic' life in a modern society. By focusing on Saunders' writings from Taylor's perspective it becomes apparent that Saunders has created a very modern theory. The author has found that different aspects of a good and authentic life are important values in Saunders' good and authentic death. These findings are followed by one question: is Saunders' hospice philosophy too focused on values such as individuality, control and autonomy, giving too little attention to fragility and dependency?
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".