Finding Consciousness
The Neuroscience, Ethics, and Law of Severe Brain Damage
1st Edition
Published on 13. January 2016
256 pages
978-0-19-028031-4 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Finding Consciousness
The Neuroscience, Ethics, and Law of Severe Brain Damage
Book
02/2016
Oxford University Press Inc
€119.80
Shipment within 15-20 days
Person
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.
Content
1 - Finding Consciousness: An Introduction
By Meghan Brayton and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
2 - Discussion with a Caring Father
By Ken Diviney and Katherine Grichnik
PART I: Consciousness
3 - The Geography of Unconsciousness: From Apparent Death to the Minimally Conscious State
By Jeffrey Baker
4 - Consciousness and Death: The Whole-Brain Formulation of Death
By James L. Bernat
5 - Modes of Consciousness
By Tim Bayne and Jakob Hohwy
PART II: Diagnosis
6 - What is it like to be in a Disorder of Consciousness
By Caroline Schnakers
7 - Decoding Thoughts in Behaviorally Non-Responsive Patients
By Adrian Owen and Lorina Naci
8 - Persistent Vegetative State, Akinetic Mutism, and Consciousness
By Will Davies and Neil Levy
PART III: Ethics
9 - Lay Attitudes to Withdrawal of Treatment in Disorders of Consciousness and Their Normative Significance
By Jacob Gipson, Guy Kahane, and Julian Savulescu
10 - Moral Conflict in the Minimally Conscious State
By Joshua Shepherd
11 - What's Good for Them? Best Interests and Severe Disorders of Consciousness
By Jennifer Hawkins
12 - Minimally Conscious States and Pain: A Different Approach to Patient Ethics
By Valerie Gray Hardcastle
PART IV: Law
13 - The Legal Circle of Life
By Nita Farahany and Rachel Zacharias
14 - Guardianship and the Injured Brain: Representation and the Rights of Patients and Families
By Joseph Fins and Barbara Pohl
References
Index
