Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is crucial to obtain a competent individual’s informed consent in any medical process, including cancer treatments. However, when it comes to incompetent children, it seems to be favourable, but not necessary, to obtain their assent in medical practice.1 This paper considers Christine Harrison’s example of Samantha, an eleven-year-old girl that was treated for osteosarcoma in her left arm. Samantha had previously been treated by amputation and a course of chemotherapy. This cancer later metastasized to her lungs, decreasing her chances of remission with aggressive treatment to 20%. Although she wanted to refuse treatment, she was deemed incompetent to make decisions about her cancer care, and her parents adamantly wanted her to continue treatment.7 This paper considers physicians’ moral obligations in pediatric cancer cases such as Samantha’s. I will define assent, the principles of autonomy, beneficence, and competence as it pertains to children. I consider arguments of two opposing views–a child’s rights view that argues in favour of Samantha’s decision, and a paternalistic view that opposes her. After reviewing the bioethical literature on the risks and benefits of children’s decision making in health care, I argue that Samantha’s wishes to stop treatment ought to be respected.Throughout the paper, I will use the bioethical principles of respect for autonomy and beneficence to defend my position. Finally, I address potential objections my position may face and conclude.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| 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 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".