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.
1. Meghan Brayton and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong: Finding Consciousness: An Introduction
2. Ken Diviney and Katherine Grichnik: Discussion with a Caring Father
PART I: Consciousness
3. Jeffrey Baker: The Geography of Unconsciousness: From Apparent Death to the Minimally Conscious
State
4. James l. Bernat: Consciousness and Death: The Whole-Brain Formulation of Death
5. Tim Bayne and Jakob Hohwy: Modes of Consciousness
PART II: Diagnosis
6. Caroline Schnakers: What is it like to be in a Disorder of Consciousness
7. Adrian Owen and Lorina Naci:
Decoding Thoughts in Behaviorally Non-Responsive Patient
8. Will Davies and Neil Levy: Persistent Vegetative State, Akinetic Mutism, and Consciousness
PART III: Ethics
9. Jacob Gipson, Guy Kahane, and Julian Savulescu: Lay Attitudes to Withdrawal of Treatment in Disorders of
Consciousness and Their Normative Significance
10. Joshua Shepherd: Moral Conflict in the Minimally Conscious State
11. Jennifer Hawkins: What's Good for Them? Best Interests and Severe Disorders of Consciousness
12. Valerie Gray Hardcastle: Minimally Conscious States and Pain: A
Different Approach to Patient Ethics
PART IV: Law
13. Nita Farahany and Rachel Zacharias: The Legal Circle of Life
14. Joseph Fins and Barbara Pohl: Guardianship and the Injured Brain: Representation and the Rights of Patients and Families
References
Index
There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, PhD, is Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics at Duke University in the Philosophy Department, the Kenan Institute for Ethics, the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and the Law School. He has served as co-chair of the Board of Officers of the American
Philosophical Association and co-director of the MacArthur Law and Neuroscience Project. He publishes widely in ethics, moral psychology and neuroscience, philosophy of law, epistemology, informal logic, and philosophy of religion.
Law and Neuroscience - Edited by Michael Freeman
A Primer on Criminal Law and Neuroscience - Stephen J. Morse and Adina L. Roskies
Neuroscience and Legal Responsibility - Edited by Nicole A. Vincent
