The ends of medicine at the end of life: understanding the ordinary-extraordinary means distinction in an age of pervasive technology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An enduring issue in Christian bioethics is locating respect for human life between two extremes: an absolute valuation and a valuation entirely conditional on life's quality.This issue finds expression in the use of the ordinary-extraordinary means distinction (OEMD), a burden-benefit calculus employed by Catholic and Protestant ethicists to judge the appropriateness of available life preserving means in particular cases.With the increasing accessibility of new technologies and procedures for extending life, unique threats to the usefulness of the OEMD are posed.In particular, humans have the novel capacity to stabilize and sustain life indefinitely in grave and unprecedented conditions.Disagreements result within and between Christian communities over how far the possibilities for preserving life should be taken.The advent of the persistent vegetative state (PVS) has caused such a disagreement.I owe a profound debt of gratitude to my father-in-law, Dr. James E.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".