The ethics of consciousness hunting: We are letting brain-damaged patients die on a false assumption

This research is fascinating stuff! That said, the fact that people who are not truly brain dead have been taken off life support is bone chilling. Imagine being aware of your family discussing pulling the plug... I very much hope that fMRI scans quickly become standard care in these cases.

For these reasons, asking CMD patients if they want to die is a non-starter for the foreseeable future. The value of functional neuroimaging applied to CMD patients lies in what it can tell us about their well-being. Improvements in communication could greatly enhance their lives, and provide insight into their experience. It could help others to care for them better, and make their lives worth living by “unlocking their voice.”

I'm glad that the article goes into this. One reason a not insignificant number of disabled people campaign against assisted suicide is that there currently aren't enough systems in place to support disabled and severely ill people. What if someone chooses to die because they have lost benefits that enable them to stay in their home with their family? Or if they can't access adequate pain relief? Is that really a choice?

The crux of the argument is that we could be doing so much more to give disabled people better lives that are worth living; we should make the act of choosing to live much less difficult for disabled people before we make choosing to die easier. So I'm glad that for the most part, this frames fMRI as a method for making people's lives better, not as simply a method to determine if they'd rather be dead without any attempt to change their situation.