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?”