ABSTRACT
Some illness stories may seem to be just about illness. Other stories explicitly present illness as a occasion for posing questions that can be called ethical or moral, although most storytellers would find those words pretentious. The title of Arthur Kleinman’s book What Really Matters (2006) provides a useful gloss on the meaning of moral and ethical in everyday life. 2 Moral action is doing what has a sense of rightness about what matters above other things. That sense of rightness can be more or less open to dialogue with those who might disagree and more or less open to accommodation with situational contingencies.
