Disorders of Consciousness (DoCs) raise difficult and complex

questions about the value of life for persons with impaired

consciousness, the rights of persons unable to make medical decisions,

and our social, medical, and ethical obligations to patients whose

personhood has frequently been
challenged and neglected. Recent

neuroscientific discoveries have led to enhanced understanding of the

heterogeneity of these disorders, and focused renewed attention on the

medical and ethical problem of misdiagnosis.

This book examines

the entanglement of epistemic and ethical uncertainty in DoCs and other

medical contexts, and how they interact to create both epistemic and

ethical risks. Philosopher and bioethicist L. Syd M Johnson pulls

together multiple threads in this work: the ontological mysteries of
consciousness,

medical uncertainty about unconsciousness, ableist bias, withdrawal of

treatment in neurointensive care, and the rarely questioned view that

consciousness is essential to personhood and moral status. Johnson

challenges longstanding bioethical dogmas about DoC patients, and argues

for
an ethics of uncertainty for contexts where there is a need for

decisive action in the presence of unavoidable uncertainty. The ethics

of uncertainty refocuses ethical inquiry concerning persons with DoCs,

placing less emphasis on their contested personhood, and more on

inductive risk and
uncertainty, on respect for autonomy, and

especially on epistemic justice. With applications to various decisional

contexts where uncertainty and ethical risk interact, this ethical

approach enables surrogate decision makers facing fraught and risky

choices to fulfill their obligations as moral and
epistemic agents.