Harriet Fagerberg

Diagnosing patients with disorders of consciousness involves inductive risk: the risk of false negative and false positive results when gathering and interpreting evidence of consciousness. A recent proposal suggests mitigating that risk by incorporating patient values into methodological choices at the level of individual diagnostic techniques: when using machine-learning algorithms to detect neural evidence of responsiveness to commands, clinicians should consider the patient’s own preferences about whether avoiding false positives or false negatives takes priority (Birch, 2023). In this paper, I argue that this proposal raises concerns about how to ensure that inevitable non-epistemic value judgments do not outweigh epistemic considerations. Additionally, it comes with challenges related to the predictive accuracy of surrogate decision-makers and the decisional burden imposed on them. Hence, I argue that patient values should not be incorporated at the level of gathering evidence of consciousness, but that they should play the leading role when considering how to respond to that evidence.

Do non-human animals have moral standing? Work on this question has focused on choosing the right grounding property (for example, personhood or sentience) while little attention has been paid to the various ways that the connection between grounding properties and moral standing has been explained. In this paper, I address that gap by offering a fresh way to approach the debate over the grounds of moral standing, including a novel taxonomy of positions, and argue that one kind of position, which takes a ‘value-first’ approach, is preferable to the other, which takes an ‘interests-first’ approach. According to value-first accounts, some individuals have moral standing because they have properties that make them valuable. According to interests-first accounts, some individuals have moral standing because they have interests, and any interest must always be taken into account. I argue that we should prefer value-first accounts because they engage directly with the problem the concept of moral standing is employed to solve, and because interests-first accounts cannot meet their explanatory burdens without begging the question against value-first accounts.