Sinnott-Armstrong W. Finding consciousness: the neuroscience, ethics, and law of severe brain damage

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. — 281 p.Modern medicine enables us to keep many people alive after they have suffered severe brain damage and show no reliable outward signs of consciousness. Many such patients are misdiagnosed as being in a permanent vegetative state when they are actually in a minimally conscious state. This mistake has far-reaching implications for treatment and prognosis. To alleviate this problem, neuroscientists have recently developed new brain-scanning methods to detect consciousness in some of these patients and even to ask them questions, including "Do you want to stay alive?"Finding Consciousness: The Neuroscience, Ethics, and Law of Severe Brain Damage addresses many questions regarding these recent neuroscientific methods: Is what these methods detect really consciousness? Do patients feel pain? Should we decide whether or not to let them die or are they competent to decide for themselves? And which kinds of treatment should governments and hospitals make available? This edited volume provides contextual information, surveys the issues and positions, and takes controversial stands from a wide variety of prominent contributors in fields ranging from neuroscience and neurology to law and policy to philosophy and ethics. Finding Consciousness should interest not only neuroscientists, clinicians, and ethicists but anyone who might suffer brain damage, which includes us all.Finding consciousness : an introduction
Discussion with a caring father
The geography of unconsciousness : from apparent death to the minimally conscious state
Consciousness and death : the whole-brain formulation of death
Modes of consciousness
What is it like to be in a disorder of consciousness
Decoding thoughts in behaviorally non-responsive patients
Persistent vegetative state, akinetic mutism, and consciousness
Lay attitudes to withdrawal of treatment in disorders of consciousness and their normative significance
Moral conflict in the minimally conscious state
What's good for them? Best interests and severe disorders of consciousness
Minimally conscious states and pain : a different approach to patient ethics
The legal circle of life
Guardianship and the injured brain : representation and the rights of patients and families