Courage and Consolation

Earlier today, I was prompted to reflection on some material I've read and studied, taught and written upon, for years without ever really pulling back on the particular corner, turning over the ground, putting the grist into the mind's mill.  In one of my online classes, a student who suffered a terrible and harrowing experience, during the course of which their (I'm using the third person plural deliberately here) own actions -- and perhaps luck, chance, or grace -- brought them through with minor injuries, revealed this to the class, as well as what troubled that student even more:  Not all of their friends had been so fortunate.  Reading Sartre and thinking about our responsibility for who we make ourselves got the student thinking, remembering, raising feelings still not entirely processed through back to the fore, leaving them "morally rattled."

Fairly understandably, none of the other students commented on their classmate's post.  It's difficult to know how to respond to such personal revelations, particularly at the beginning of a class, when perhaps one has but the briefest of acquaintance with one's fellow learners.  I tend to think that in these sorts of situations the young find themselves more at a loss, resourcesless than do their elders -- though there are many very insightful, empathetic younger people and enough clueless older people to render that generalization not entirely reliable.  I wrote the student privately, offering condolences, a bit of my own experience, and a few suggestions about how the class and our subject matters might provide some resources for working things through.  Then I commented publicly.

In my public post, I praised the student's decision to write about the matter as "prudent," but in my private remarks, I invoked a different virtue: courage.  What was particularly striking to me was that the student's reply, thanking me for not leaving their post just hanging out there as well as for what I'd written in private, also mentioned and lauded courage, this time on my part.  Does that language, that concept, that virtue, fit this sort of situation?

NPR: Dignity Therapy for the Dying, A Chance to Rewrite Life

Can telling the story of their lives help the dying?  Yes and no, which should come as little surprise, given how varied the situations, responses, desires, and lives of those who are dying turn out to be.  It depends very much on what we mean by “help,” what the process of telling the story of one’s life is intended to do, and how involved of a process the “telling” becomes.

Virtue Ethics, by the very structure of the actual moral theories that comprise that approach — going beyond merely holding that virtues (lasting developed habitual dispositions) are good things and vices bad, and even beyond shifting from evaluating actions alone to evaluating persons and their characters — understands and teaches that one of the key questions for Ethics is generically “What is a good life?” and more specifically:  “What is a good life for me?”  “What is a good life for this or that person?”