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Record W3200822225 · doi:10.1136/medethics-2021-107837

Taking the long view on slippery slope objections

2021· letter· en· W3200822225 on OpenAlexaffabout
Eric Mathison

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Medical Ethics · 2021
Typeletter
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicEthics and Legal Issues in Pediatric Healthcare
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Lethbridge
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSlippery slopeWorryArgument (complex analysis)Social psychologyLawHealth carePsychologyLaw and economicsSociologyMedicinePsychiatryPolitical science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Canada’s new medical assistance in dying (MAiD) law is ethically superior to the previous version. I agree with Udo Shuklenk and Jocelyn Downie1 that both social determinants of health and slippery slope objections to the recent amendments are unsuccessful.[1] Despite this broad agreement, I worry that the authors’ argument against the slippery slope objection is too focused on the current amendments at the expense of future changes. Before I address that argument, I have one point about the social determinants of health. Any treatment that goes against a patient’s values is wrong. Critics of expanding MAiD criteria are concerned that expanded access will mean that persons with disabilities, among others, will be more likely to be pressured into getting an assisted death. Were there is evidence for this worry, it ought to be taken seriously. However, in my work as a clinical ethicist, it is overwhelmingly more common for me to be consulted about clinical situations where patient values are disregarded for the sake of invasive life-sustaining treatment, rather than concerns about hastened death. This takes different forms. In some cases, a healthcare provider or a family member will pressure a patient who has decision-making capacity. This is why patients occasionally ask that their request for MAiD be kept private from their family: the patient is worried about being pressured out of it (or of dealing with the other effects of MAiD’s stigma). In non-MAiD cases, a patient’s substitute decision-maker will request treatment with the aim of maximising length of life, despite knowledge that the patient did not want life-sustaining treatment …

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)0.016
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.053
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Research integrity, Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesResearch integrity
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Commentary · Consensus signal: Commentary
Teacher disagreement score0.103
Threshold uncertainty score0.998

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0160.053
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0090.111
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

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 head0.142
GPT teacher head0.446
Teacher spread0.304 · 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 designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreCommentary

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

Citations2
Published2021
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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