MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort

Tracing the Soul: Medical Decisions at the Margins of Life

2000· article· en· W2036011557 on OpenAlexaff
Walter Glannon

Bibliographic record

VenueChristian bioethics Non-Ecumenical Studies in Medical Morality · 2000
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicTheology and Philosophy of Evil
Canadian institutionsMcGill University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSoulPossession (linguistics)Value of lifeConsciousnessEnvironmental ethicsValue (mathematics)Set (abstract data type)LawFunction (biology)Human lifePersonhoodMental capacitySocial psychologySociologyPsychologyEpistemologyPhilosophyPolitical sciencePsychiatryBiologyComputer science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Most religious traditions hold that what makes one a person is the possession of a soul and that this gives one moral status. This status in turn gives persons interests and rights that delimit the set of actions that are permitted to be done to them. In this paper, I identify the soul with the capacity for consciousness and mental life and examine the ethical aspects of medical decision-making at the beginning and end of life in cases of patients who either never have had or have lost this capacity. I argue that, although these patients may lack moral status, they nonetheless have moral value as human organisms and forms of God-given biological life. In particular, I explore what this value entails about the permissibility of withholding or withdrawing life-sustaining treatment and of harvesting viable organs from patients with no higher-brain function.

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)0.006
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.014
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Science and technology studies, Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesScience and technology studies
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.425
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0060.014
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.026
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0010.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0250.000

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 head0.186
GPT teacher head0.390
Teacher spread0.204 · 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

Citations7
Published2000
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueChristian bioethics Non-Ecumenical Studies in Medical MoralitySame topicTheology and Philosophy of EvilFrench-language works237,207