Bibliographic record
Abstract
Language shapes ethical perceptions, profoundly influencing societal attitudes toward euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (PAS). Historically condemned by Western medicine as a violation of life's sanctity, euthanasia has undergone a dramatic transformation through deliberate linguistic reframing. Euphemisms such as "death with dignity" and "medical aid in dying" align euthanasia with values of compassion, autonomy, and patient empowerment, often overshadowing its moral implications for human dignity. This article critically examines how these linguistic shifts have influenced the normalization of euthanasia; broadened eligibility criteria; and facilitated its legal acceptance across nations like the Netherlands, Belgium, and Canada. Engaging secular arguments from consequentialism and autonomy-based ethics reveals their limitations, particularly their disregard for moral intentionality, relational responsibilities, and the intrinsic worth of life. Drawing on Catholic moral theology and virtue ethics, this study advocates for precise, transparent language alongside actionable policies, expanded palliative care, robust conscience protections, comprehensive public education, and stringent safeguards to protect vulnerable populations and resist ethical erosion. Reclaiming ethical clarity requires more than abstract discussion - it demands bold action in language and policy to counter euphemistic normalization and affirm the inherent dignity of human life.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".