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Record W2021620266 · doi:10.1162/152651603322874915

Will the "Secular Priests" of Bioethics Work Among the Sinners?

2003· article· en· W2021620266 on OpenAlexaff
Chris MacDonald

Bibliographic record

VenueThe American Journal of Bioethics · 2003
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldHealth Professions
TopicEthics in medical practice
Canadian institutionsSaint Mary's University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsBioethicsMetaphorSociologyWork (physics)LawPsychoanalysisPsychologySocial psychologyEpistemologyPhilosophyPolitical scienceTheology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In this paper I explore briefly the "secular priesthood" metaphor often applied to bioethicists. I next ask: if, despite our discomfort with the metaphor, we were to embrace the best aspects of the priesthood(s)--which I identify as the missionaries' willingness to work among sinners and lepers, at their own peril--would we be able to live up to that standard of bravery? I then draw a parallel with the fears of contagion currently be voiced (by Carl Elliott and others), with regard to bioethicists working in or near coporate settings. I argue that such fears may themselves have a number of deleterious effects, and I suggest several possible positive steps in response to that fear.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.055
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.053
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Science and technology studies, Research integrity
Consensus categoriesMetaresearch, Science and technology studies
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.559
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0550.053
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.002
Science and technology studies0.0020.026
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0020.000
Research integrity0.0000.023
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.112
GPT teacher head0.470
Teacher spread0.359 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations12
Published2003
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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