CV NEWS FEED // Facing the end of one’s life offers a unique opportunity to cultivate relationships, meaning, virtue, and other goods, which are a part of “flourishing at the end of life,” a recent article in a bioethics journal argues.
The article’s authors explained that the concept of “human flourishing” has roots in Aristotle’s ethics framework, which holds that for human beings to flourish, they must participate in rational activity virtuously, in accord with their nature.
Several goods that are related to this flourishing, according to the article, are deep relationships with others, having a sense of meaning and purpose, and possessing the virtues.
The Aug. 20 article published in “Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics” also examines the concept of “flourishing” when one is suffering from a terminal illness or facing the end of his or her life.
“Flourishing is not a common word in end of life care,” wrote Xavier Symons, one of the article’s authors, in a post to X. “But we argue that certain human goods, like meaning, virtue, and close relationships… [a]re uniquely realizable at the end of life, and that conditional notions of flourishing ought to inform our assessments of wellbeing in palliative and cancer care.”
“We hope this paper will be a valuable contribution to discussions about what it means to die a good death,” added Symons, who is the director of Plunkett Centre for Ethics, an organization that conducts teaching and research through a Catholic perspective, according to its website.
John Rhee, Anthony Tanous, Tracy Balboni, and Tyler VanderWeele joined Symons in authoring the paper.
The article argues that in a unique way, facing the end of one’s life may help facilitate the growth of relationships, virtue, meaning, and other goods, but the authors also added that the article’s goal “is not to glorify terminal illness or the dying process.”
“We do not wish to romanticize the dying process and the pain and suffering that typically accompany it,” they wrote in the article.
There is an argument that the suffering and pain caused by “terminal illness… renders the human person incapable of flourishing,” the authors wrote. “We wish to challenge this idea, and to instead argue that there are certain dimensions of human existence that one can enter into more fully when one’s life is ending.”
One such dimension relates to finding meaning and purpose, which is crucial for flourishing at the end of life, the authors argued.
“Flourishing (or, one of its contraries—languishing) at the end of life is contingent on one’s capacity to find meaning when life is ending,” they wrote. They later noted that when faced with the end of life, one may have more time for reflection on the entirety, or the narrative, of his or her whole life. Additionally, as people grow older, they “appear to become more spiritual,” the authors wrote.
A terminal illness may also cause a person to reorder his or her priorities, giving “the cultivation or restoration of close familial relationships or spiritual and religious engagement” more importance than previously-prioritized goals in the professional sphere, for example.
Drawing on Aristotle, the authors wrote about how friendship and deep relationships are also important to live a good or flourishing life, and how approaching the end of life can deepen these relationships. This can happen especially when accompanying a loved one during his or her terminal illness, the authors later wrote.
The end of life can also help one grow in virtues, such as patience, humility, and selflessness, the authors argued.
“Virtues, after all, are acquired through practice, particularly practice in challenging situations,” they wrote. “If one did not have adequate occasion to exercise virtue, then one would not be able to acquire virtue.”
The authors suggested that these considerations about human flourishing can be integrated when caring for people facing the end of their lives, to improve their overall wellbeing.
“With appropriate empirical evidence,” they wrote, “clinicians would be well-placed to offer interventions that might help people nearing the end of life better realize these goods and attain higher levels of wellbeing in their final days and weeks of life.”
The full article can be accessed here.
