CHAPTER 5
OPEN-MINDEDNESS
I have argued that in addition to the virtues of honesty, justice and courage the
professional virtue of trustworthiness is essential for nursing conceived as a practice in
the technical sense that MacIntyre uses that term. Where full virtue is not possible (and I
have provided some reasons why full virtue might not be possible) then these
dispositions must be expressed in a minimal formulation as professional virtues. The
importance of trust and trustworthiness cannot be over-emphasised yet there are
components of the professional virtue of trustworthiness about which more must yet be
said. One such feature identified by Potter (2002) and discussed briefly in Chapter 4 is
the need to understand the epistemic requirements of being trustworthy as a nurse. In
this chapter one aspect of these epistemic responsibilities, the need to be dispositionally
open-minded, is discussed. As such, open-mindedness is regarded as a necessary
professional virtue for the practice of nursing. Aiming towards being dispositionally
open-minded contributes to the maintenance of epistemic responsibilities by helping
nurses avoid becoming either closed-minded or credulous. These two failures of open-
mindedness have the potential not only to corrupt the practice of nursing but also to
make more difficult the task of nursing; that is to say that a failure of open-mindedness
on the part of a nurse is likely to hinder rather than enable the flourishing of more-than-
ordinarily vulnerable persons.
Open-mindedness as a virtue
It is unusual to find open-mindedness listed as a virtue in its own right although it
would seem to be a tradition in science that intellectual integrity requires an open-mind
(see, for example, Williams 2002, Hare 2003). Where the idea of open-mindedness as a
virtue gains support it is more likely to appear as a virtue of the intellect rather than a
virtue of character. It might be assumed that because being open-minded requires the
use of cognition then if it is a virtue at all it is a virtue limited to the intellectual domain.
The distinction between virtues of the intellect and virtues of the character (sometimes
stated as a distinction between the intellectual and the moral virtues) comes, of course,
from Aristotle. As a result of this distinction there has been a tendency to assume that
the realm of action is the province of the moral rather than the intellectual virtues. While
assumptions of this kind are understandable in the light of this distinction it provides
only a partial reconstruction of Aristotle’s account of the role of the virtues in the life of
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