Philosophical Perspectives on Trustworthiness and Open-mindedness as Professional Virtues for the Practice of Nursing: Implications for he Moral Education of Nurses



more-than-ordinarily vulnerable persons is at stake. Additionally, assessing the value of
evidence and argument on which to base trustworthy practice also requires those very
virtues that MacIntyre identifies as constitutive of the practice itself. Thus, being open-
minded requires the virtues of honesty, justice and courage. The nurse who is disposed
to honesty, justice and courage is more likely to be inclined to recognise the limitations
of the evidence-base for practice; is more likely to engage in critical review of evidence;
and is more likely to continue to seek out evidence in the pursuit of truth. Such a nurse
approximates what I have termed an honest enquirer who, as Haack puts it:

.. .wants the true answer to his question: if he is inquiring into whether cigarette
smoking causes cancer, he wants to end up believing that cigarette smoking
causes cancer if cigarette smoking causes cancer, and that it doesn’t if it doesn’t
(and that it’s a lot more complicated than that if it’s a lot more complicated than
that)...

(Haack 1998 p. 9)
In short, such a nurse genuinely wants to know whether her or his practice is
contributing to the flourishing of
more-than-ordinarily vulnerable persons and in
pursuit of this goal is open to the possibility that current practice may need to change in
the light of appropriate evidence. Thus this nurse is open-minded and trustworthy for
she or he is taking seriously her or his epistemic responsibilities. As such, this idealised
nurse will be demonstrating what I termed in Chapter 1
professional phronesis, that is, a
practical wisdom bom out of engaging with nursing as a MacIntyrean practice in a
tmstworthy and open-minded way.

Evidence and open-mindedness for nursing practice

I have noted that aiming for open-mindedness requires inter alia making an effort to
assess the legitimacy of evidence in order to attend to the sorts of evidence necessary
for the pursuit of nursing as a MacIntyrean practice. In Chapter 3 I noted that ideas
about the nature of nursing remain contested and it is, therefore, important for nurses to
be in a position to assess the evidence on which competing ideas rely. After all, any
serious appeal to evidence must anticipate appropriate challenges to that evidence.
Evidence provides one means by which we can make informed choices about the
appropriateness of nursing interventions. But it is possible that we can easily be misled
about legitimacy of evidence if we do not pay attention to the way in which evidence
becomes available. In his discussion about the marketplace of ideas, Bernard Williams
(2002) notes that there is a very real danger that the unregulated marketplace that is the

4Iam grateful to Terence McLaughlin for these suggested questions about which it might be

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