Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objections to the criminal prohibition against euthanasia and assisted suicide are commonly framed in a number of ways, including the perceived threat to vulnerable persons (slippery slope), the sanctity of life, an affirmation of the proper role of the physician in the clinical relationship or the anomaly that is seen to be created by the legality of suicide and refusals of life-sustaining treatment A different type of objection is proposed which focuses on the limits to autonomous decision-making which typically accompany suicidal intentions. It is argued that a criminal prohibition against assisted suicide is justified by doubts about the state of the suicidal individual's understanding, freedom from coercive influences and ability to rationally evaluate his or her situation. While the law may not view one's own suicide as helpfully dealt with by the criminal law, the participation of another, in lending assistance to a suicide, is an appropriate object of criminal sanction. It is conceivable that one contemplating suicide could both make this decision in an adequately autonomous way and also require assistance. However, the difficulties inherent in determining whether a particular suicidal decision is sufficiently autonomous, coupled with its grave and irrevocable consequences, justify a general criminal ban on acts which promote the suicide of another. Decriminalizing such assistance would threaten to abandon suicidal persons to their own potentially inadequate capacity for self-determination at an especially vulnerable time, inviting tragic and irretrievable mistakes.
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 | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.074 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".