The Last Hand You Hold: Deathbed Coherence and the First-Personal Ethics of Dying

This paper introduces deathbed coherence, a terminal manifestation of ethical coherence, defined as the firstpersonal alignment between an agent’s life and their diachronic evaluative commitments, grasped in lucid retrospection at the end of life. It argues that such coherence is ethically significant even in the total absence of external recognition, narrative closure, or social consequence. Drawing on work in moral psychology, practical identity theory, and the philosophy of death, the paper contends that the first-personal, private nature of deathbed coherence does not undermine its normative weight. While dominant frameworks for ethics at the end of life emphasize intersubjective intelligibility and the socially embedded nature of meaning, this paper carves out conceptual space for a mode of final ethical self-reckoning that is both narratively invisible and morally substantive.