that the purpose of teaching for nursing is teaching for good will, virtues, and
professional phronesis.
Teaching for good will
Teaching that aims for the development of good will (in the strong sense) in students of
nursing requires that nurse teachers have a clear idea of what good will entails. As
indicated in Chapter 4, good will requires more than mere well meaning intention for it
is commonplace that well meaning intentions can very easily lead to harm. If we assume
that well meaning intention is akin to everyday understandings of altruism, and given
that there is at least anecdotal evidence to suggest that those who become students of
nursing generally do so because they want to help others, then we might say that the
students in front of us are of the ‘right sort’ and will want to put their well meaning
intentions to good use. Just as Aristotle suggests that those young men who already
have some understanding of the importance of being noble and just will gain most from
his lectures on ethics (Bumyeat 1984) so we might say that those students who already
have some nascent conception of nursing as a practice (or at least as an activity with
some worthwhile internal goods) will be most receptive to ideas about nursing as a
professional ideal requiring certain sorts of dispositions. If this is true then the selection
of students for nursing becomes a matter of considerable consequence for the practice of
nursing will be best served by recruiting those with appropriate altruistic emotions and
dispositions. But as a raw emotion, there is nothing about altruism per se that gives us
grounds for confidence that it alone can guide professional practice. In this sense
altruism shares the issue highlighted in Chapter 1 in relation to virtue. That is, that life
in our often comfortable liberal democracies does not provide challenges to our
altruistic emotions sufficient to develop these emotions in ways that can help us to act
morally when faced with extra-ordinary challenges. Thus something that should be of
serious concern to nurse teachers is the question of how we might go about enabling
students to turn their altruistic intentions into good will. The practitioner with good will
in the strong sense will recognise the limitations of mere well meant intentions; will
recognise that to turn such intentions into good will requires that their genuine regard
for the welfare of others must be augmented by a well informed approach to their
practice.
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