Autonomy, Identity and the Right to Die: A Qualitative Study of Medically Assisted Death Attitudes in the Canadian Context
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Canada, medically-assisted death has been legal since June 17th, 2016, when Bill C-14 received royal assent in the Canadian legislature. The legal proceedings around MAiD in Canada have been supported by non-governmental organizations and advocacy groups, for and against MAiD. The legalization of MAiD is the culmination of decades of organization and advocacy, supported by generally favourable public opinion. In this dissertation, the author develops a theory to explain why individuals increasingly identify with pro-MAiD beliefs. The study consequently makes two contributions to the sociological literature; 1) it reveals the connections between autonomy, care work, humanism, and pro-MAiD identities; 2) it features the development of a critical realist social psychology, focused on the reflexivity and the creation of personal moral identity.\n Specifically, the study is focused on how lived experiences of death including caregiving, bereavement, and/or serious illness, inform pro-MAiD beliefs for volunteers and other actors involved with pro-euthanasia organizations. The author theorizes that pro-MAiD identities are centred primarily on the principle of autonomy, which is couched within humanist and naturalist cultural frameworks, and enacted through care work. Specifically, over the course of care work, volunteers and other movement participants witnessed what they perceived as a fundamental loss of identity by the people for whom they were caring. The loss of identity witnessed by these carers motivated them to pursue greater autonomy over their own deaths, and to therefore avoid the deterioration they witnessed in others. It also motivated them to act as social carriers for the dissemination of norms associated with pro-MAiD political stances.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".