Johnson’s (2016) article begins by considering various inferences regarding patients with disorders of consciousness (DoC)—from inferences in diagnosing, including those involved by the use of neuroimaging, to inferences concerning quality of life and prognosis. She then discusses inductive risks—the chance that one will be wrong in accepting or rejecting a scientific hypothesis, such as accepting that a patient is conscious when in fact the patient is not. Johnson explains how these risks affect decisions about withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment, as well as how best to care for such types of patients, discussing the ethical significance of such risks, for instance, when conscious patients are misdiagnosed as unconscious or when prognosis of permanence is incorrect. The author ends her article by arguing for prescriptive measures to mitigate and manage those associated risks. I focus here on two issues. The first considers the importance of strategies designed to mitigate inductive risk around issues involving consciousness, and the second relates to the role of values in DoC.
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