What Role is “Pure Experience” Consciousness Supposed to Play in Medical Ethics?: Pure Experience, Moral Status, and Clinical Decisions

摘要

Laura Specker Sullivan’s article “Pure Experience and Disorders of Consciousness” provides an alternative account of consciousness in medical decision making. She argues focusing solely on phenomenological consciousness misses the mark in guiding medical decisions for patients with disorders of consciousness. Rather, we should also account for “pure experience” consciousness (PEC), the view that what matters “is the bare existence of subjective experience—that there is something it is like to be you, not the particular quality of what this experience is like nor the objective content of this experience” (Specker Sullivan 2018, 112).