been conditioned to act in particular ways not from choice but from, say, indoctrination
cannot be considered a fully realised moral agent as such. So merely attempting to get
people to act morally is not moral education as here conceived. Once we recognise that
moral education requires moral agency we must recognise that moral education is
complex and will require considerable intellectual as well as practical effort on the part
of both learner and teacher. Wilson et al. argue for moral education as education
“.. .imparting those skills which are necessary to make good or reasonable moral
decisions and to act on them” (Wilson et al. p. 27) and in so doing they liken moral
teaching to the teaching of science as teaching a method rather than the imparting of
information; that is, the teaching of science undertaken with an appropriate regard for
the traditions and forms of enquiry of the subject. Where the real lesson of science
education is to understand the standards of scientific enquiry, to be able to recognise
when science is done with integrity, open-mindedness, and suchlike (the internal goods
of science in MacIntyre’s terms) in a genuine attempt to find out how things really are,
the real object of moral education is to enable individuals to express moral agency in the
honest pursuit of human good. On this account the ethical nurse is one who genuinely
seeks to make and act on moral decisions that aim for the good of more-than-ordinarily
vulnerable persons. Making and acting on genuinely moral decisions requires accepting
one’s own moral responsibility and doing so on the basis of seeking an understanding of
(as Aristotle might say) the universals as well as the particulars of human flourishing in
relation both to the more-than-ordinarily vulnerable person with whom one is
confronted and with oneself.
Moral education or moral training?
We have seen that nursing is more that the mere competent completion of tasks for such
a description would provide only an impoverished view of an inherently complex
activity. Of course it is important that a nurse practice with a minimum of safe
competence in whatever particular skills are required given the specific type of nursing
work with which she or he is engaged. Developing some of the necessary skills and
competences requires training, thus training (as opposed to education in a wider sense)
is a component of nurse education. But training someone to carry out a particular
activity implies that they must Ieam to undertake a task or set of tasks following a set of
rules of the kind: if x then y. Thus training is involved when someone is taught to insert
twelve 5cm bolts in the correct holes in the correct order when working in a factory on
an assembly line. And this is perfectly acceptable in terms of learning to undertake a
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