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

CHAPTER 6

EDUCATION FOR THE MORAL PRACTICE OF NURSING

In this thesis I have been engaged with a preliminary exploration of what it means to
understand nursing as a practice in the sense that MacIntyre uses that term. Insofar as
conceiving of nursing as a MacIntyrean practice indicates excellence, it provides an
idealisation of nursing to which those who wish to be good nurses can aspire in pursuit
of the goal ofhelping more-than-ordinarily vulnerable persons to flourish. Evinced in
this idealised conception of a nurse is the care and compassion that underpins the
enterprise of nursing and those who subscribe to it must aim to cultivate the appropriate
virtues: this is to say that those who wish to engage with nursing as a practice will need
to cultivate inter alia the three core virtues of honesty, justice and courage as well the
professional virtues of trustworthiness and open-mindedness. A good nurse in this
conception is one who genuinely wishes to enable the flourishing of more-than-
Ordinarily vulnerable persons. Those who do cultivate the virtues necessary for nursing
will characteristically act in ways that promote the flourishing of the patients and at the
same time will enhance their own flourishing qua humans.

Because nurses work with more-than-ordinarily vulnerable persons nursing is an
inherently moral practice for (whether they recognise it or not) the actions of nurses will
have an impact on patients’ flourishing. It follows that the education of nurses is
inevitably of a moral kind and it seems desirable that nurse teachers should aim to
enable students of nursing to cultivate appropriate professional virtues in order that they
may Ieam to engage in nursing as a practice. While the ideal is that those who engage
with nursing as a practice cultivate ‘full’ virtue it is necessary to recognise that for some
(perhaps many) the fragmentation of modernity may make this difficult. Nevertheless, it
would seem appropriate to aim, as a minimum, for the cultivation of the very specific
professional virtues (of trustworthiness and open-mindedness) tailored to the practice of
nursing. As such, one function of nurse teachers is to provide opportunities for students
of nursing to come to recognise, understand and develop the specific application and
expression of trustworthiness and open-mindedness in nursing practice.

The nature of this moral education in any particular institution (for there is no national
curriculum for nursing as such) will depend upon the assumptions about normative
ethics held in that institution. In this thesis I have accepted what Steutel and Carr

158

<<   155   156   157   158   159   160   161   >>

More intriguing information