Do We – and Should We – Have a Canadian Bioethics?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Do we have a genuinely Canadian bioethics – and not only a practice of bioethics in Canada? This question, and this paper, are about the connection between bioethics and the actual healthcare, research, and public health experiences of Canadians. In addressing it, I am inspired by the philosophy of pragmatism that stresses the importance of everyday experience as a starting point for ethics, and of human flourishing as a goal for ethics. Through this lens, an ideal Canadian bioethics is one that is rooted in the lived experiences of Canadians; it reflects the ideal of flourishing projected by Canadian individuals, including their views on their political communities. However, it is unclear if a full-fledged Canadian bioethics has taken shape given increasingly uniform scholarship worldwide that sets expectations about the kinds of moral problems worth investigating and the kinds of solutions to be adopted. In the spirit of thinking about this question, I discuss aspects of Canadian society that could shape the development of a Canadian bioethics: (a) the existence of competing Canadian political narratives, (b) the distinctiveness of Canadian healthcare systems and healthcare experiences, (c) the commitment of Canadians to certain values and aspirations, (d) the institutional and procedural aspects of the Canadian public sphere, (e) the challenges of increasingly uniform scholarship across geographic and national contexts, and (f) the practical obstacles to developing a Canadian bioethics. These challenges that Canadian bioethics faces are likely relevant internationally for all contexts in which socially shaped moral problems are discussed and solutions envisioned.
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.
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 | 0.010 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.023 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it