Abstract
We are grateful to Fischer and Truog for their thoughtful commentary on our work on the minimally conscious state (MCS), disorders of consciousness, and the rights owed to this patient population. They have provided a serious and scholarly critique, and we are grateful for this opportunity to respond. Our reply can be framed around two ironies embedded in their title: “the problem with fixating on consciousness in disorders of consciousness.” On the one hand there is an apparent contradiction in terms of wanting to remove the distinguishing aspects of consciousness from a suite of conditions marked by its profound alteration. On the other, there is a less obvious but perhaps more telling problem originating with the use of the verb, “fixating.”