Physician-Assisted Suicide, Euthanasia, and Bioethics in Nazi and Contemporary Cinema
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Today, physician-assisted suicide and/or euthanasia are legal in several European countries, Canada, several jurisdictions in the United States and Australia, and may soon become legal in many more jurisdictions. While traditional Hippocratic and religious medical ethics have long opposed these practices, contemporary culture and politics have slowly weakened opposition to physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. Our chapter examines how assisted suicide and euthanasia have been presented in cinema, one of the most powerful influences on culture, by Nazi propagandists during the German Third Reich and by Western filmmakers since the end of World War II. Almost all contemporary films about assisted suicide and euthanasia, including six winners of Academy Awards, promote these practices as didIch klage an(I Accuse) (1941), the best and archetypal Nazi feature film about euthanasia. The bioethical justifications of assisted suicide or euthanasia in bothIch klage anand contemporary films are strikingly similar: showing mercy; avoiding fear and/or disgust; equating loss of capability with loss of a reason to live; enabling self-determination and the right-to-die; conflating voluntary with involuntary and nonvoluntary euthanasia; and casting opposition as out-of-date traditionalism. Economics and eugenics, two powerful arguments for euthanasia during the Third Reich, are not highlighted inIch klage anand are only obliquely mentioned in contemporary cinema. One dramatic difference in the cinema of the two periods is the prominence of medical professionals inIch klage anand their conspicuous absence in contemporary films about assisted suicide and euthanasia. A discussion of the medical ethos of the two time periods reveals how cinema both reflects and influences the growing acceptance of assisted suicide and euthanasia.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".