The experience of dignity in the context of medical assistance in dying: A phenomenological and hermeneutic study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Medical assistance in dying has become a significant topic of debate in Western societies, where legalization is expanding. A key feature of this debate is the appeal to dignity, invoked by both proponents and opponents. Two dominant conceptions of dignity emerge from the literature: ontological dignity and dignity based on autonomy. Public discourse often draws on these frameworks. This study aims to move beyond this binary by exploring dignity through the lived experiences of individuals who choose medical assistance in dying. Using a phenomenological-hermeneutic approach, interviews were conducted with six patients considering medical assistance in dying and six bereaved individuals. Five key themes emerged: 1) dignity-autonomy, 2) dignity-identity, 3) dignity without and with others, 4) suffering and doubt, 5) embodied and contextualized experience. While autonomy initially appears central, further analysis, informed by Ricoeur's philosophical concepts, highlights a relational dimension that refines a purely autonomy-centered understanding of dignity.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".