S3-1 The ethical, legal and professional landscape of physician hastened death
Bibliographic record
Abstract
<h3></h3> Although many countries prohibit physician assisted dying, an increasing number of jurisdictions are making moves to allow the practice. Opinion remains sharply divided over the rights and wrongs of making such a move—disagreement continues about which practice(s) should be accommodated, how such practices such be labelled, and the strength of the ethical and professional arguments on either side. Building on my previous research, I will first address some <i>preliminary matters</i>, specifically introducing the (contested and confusing) range of terms used in these debates, as well as providing a snapshot of some of the different legal responses around the world. Against this backdrop, I move to consider important <i>moral matters</i> by focusing on the main ethical arguments for and against allowing (physician) assisted dying. Arguments in favour of the practice essentially claim that choice matters and suffering matters. Arguments against the practice, meanwhile, claim that life matters, medicine matters, and consequences matter. I will therefore engage with key claims about respect for autonomy, quality of life, the intrinsic value of life, the integrity of medicine, and the prospect of embarking on ‘slippery slopes’. These are well-worn arguments, and understandably so, given the strength of feeling and the apparent strength of the claims on each side. Moving to <i>end matters</i>, I consider the merits of a different way forward. In a departure from many contributions to this longstanding debate, I suggest that a case can be made for striking a balance between the opposing camps, such that each side can make gains, whilst also incurring losses. On such a contested landscape, there may be worst places to be than the ‘middle ground’. I will sketch some of the options which can occupy this middle ground, in the hope this offers a fresh perspective and a different way forward.
Stored with the screening record, where it is evidence for the labels above.
How this classification was reachedexpand
The three-model screen
all 5,600 screened works →All three models called this out of scope.
Bioethics symposium paper on physician-hastened death; not about research.
The article addresses ethical and legal arguments about physician-assisted dying, not research itself.
Ethics of physician-hastened death; clinical end-of-life ethics, not research integrity or methods.
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 | 0.007 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.054 | 0.012 |
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".