seeming inability of nursing to define itself and, in particular, from the positioning of
some practitioners and scholars who pursue an ideal of nursing science as a corollary to
medical science. It is one of my contentions that this concentration of effort on the
development of a discrete nursing science is misguided and, moreover, threatens
conceptions of nursing as a response to human vulnerability. It is true that science has
much to offer nursing but to consider nursing as solely a science, or as merely a set of
technical tasks to be accomplished is to misunderstand the nature of nursing. Nursing is
not, and can never be, merely a set of prescribed competencies precisely because the
human condition makes it unlikely that any interaction with a patient will ever be just a
matter of routine. As well as being professional, interactions between nurses and
patients are inevitably (interpersonal and as such there is a need to resist those
pressures that might incline nurses to view patients as just so many widgets to be
processed through a service as one might see customers in a garage or a shop. While
garage employees and shop assistants may engage in ‘customer care’, such care is more
likely to originate from instrumental and commercial interests than from any primary
concern for the best interests of the customer. Hence, while there are some moral
constraints in any form of service, there are greater moral expectations of nurses and
other health care professionals than of service industry workers. In this thesis I make an
attempt to identify what it is that places nursing in the category of occupations in which
practitioners are expected to uphold particular (and generally higher than everyday)
moral standards. Neglect of the moral content of nursing does a disservice to nursing as
an occupation, to individual nurses, and to individual patients. Consequently, I place
moral considerations, and in particular matters of character, at the core of nursing
practice and education. In so doing questions about the nature and purpose(s) of nursing
as well as questions about what makes a good nurse inevitably arise. In addressing these
questions it will become clear that a good nurse is one who exhibits certain sorts of
virtues and, for reasons that will be made explicit, I have adopted the term professional
virtue to describe these virtues. No attempt is made in this thesis to list every
professional virtue that might be thought necessary for the practice of nursing, rather a
number of core professional virtues are identified and two are discussed in detail.
A NOTE ON NOMENCLATURE
It should be noted at the outset that the term ‘patient’ is not universally accepted as an
appropriate word to describe individuals in receipt of nursing care. Some nurses prefer
the term client on the grounds that it implies a less passive relationship on the part of the
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