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

describe as an aretaic virtue ethics as forming the most appropriate grounding for a
moral education consistent with the idea of nursing as a practice. Arguing that a broad
conception of virtue ethics (and thus a broad conception of a virtue-based moral
education) would include Kohlbergian as well as Kantian and utilitarian understandings
of virtue, Steutel and Carr define an aretaic virtue ethics as consistent with the general
thrust of virtue ethics as contrasted with Kantian and utilitarian ethics. It is an aretaic (as
opposed to a deontic) ethics because the primary focus is related to “... the evaluation
of persons, their characters, intentions and motives” (Steutel and Carr 1999 p. 8).
Presupposing the existence of character, an aretaic virtue ethics requires that moral
judgments include judgements about the virtues that go to make up the character of an
individual. Consequently a moral education predicated on an aretaic virtue ethics will be
concerned with cultivating the virtues. On this account the moral education of nurses is
an education that seeks to encourage the development of those virtues that make
possible nursing as a practice in the MacIntyrean sense. This is contrasted with much
that is commonplace in education generally and in nursing education where the aims of,
for example, the teaching of ethics to nurses may be predicated on ideas of the
intellectualisation of knowledge separated in some sense from the world of nursing
practice. In this chapter I make a preliminary excursion into a discussion about the
implications of an aretaic virtue ethics approach to the moral education of nurses.

Nursing education as moral education

The essence of education for nursing then is the cultivation in nurses of certain sorts of
virtues, virtues that are both constitutive of nursing as a practice and of flourishing for
nurses qua humans. We might refer to these as the virtues of nursing. Cultivating these
sorts of virtues inclines students and practitioners towards recognising their own
practical learning needs. So, for example, in cultivating trustworthiness the nurse comes
to understand that being trustworthy requires she or he develop the practical skills and
competences necessary to practice safe nursing with the patients in her or his care.
However, the aim of nurse education is primarily to enable the flourishing of more-
than-ordinarily vulnerable persons rather than the flourishing of nurses. Consistent with
nursing as a practice in the MacIntyrean sense this requires nurses to develop a unity of
virtue at least insofar as these virtues find expression in the practice of nursing. These
virtues include in particular the virtues of honesty, courage and justice as well as the
(professional) virtues of trustworthiness and open-mindedness. Additionally, and
consistent with an Aristotelian conception of virtue, is a requirement for the

159

<<   156   157   158   159   160   161   162   >>

More intriguing information