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

the same scrutiny of teaching for intellectual virtue might reveal that we have much
work to do to understand how any virtue (be it intellectual or moral) may be taught.
While Aristotle talks of the time and experience necessary for the teaching of
intellectual virtue and in contrast the use Ofhabituation in the pursuit of moral virtue, it
is far from obvious that habituation is not involved in the cultivation of both precisely
because it is far from clear that the separation of intellectual and moral virtues is
established. Indeed, Steutel and Spiecker (2005) suggest that there might be a stronger
prima facie case for thinking that habituation is better suited to enabling the cultivation
of intellectual virtue (in the form of habits of the mind) than it is in cultivation of what
they term sentimental dispositions.

In many ways it is helpful to maintain a distinction between the intellectual and moral
domains but we might be well advised to resist the temptation to imagine this
categorisation provides us with full understanding of virtue. It may well be the case that,
as with the infant who confuses cats with dogs, the criteria we use in the categorisation
process are insufficiently discriminating. It may serve us well as part of coming to
understand phenomena but as we know from our educational experiences, learning is
largely iterative and the more deeply immersed we become in a subject the more we
begin to recognise the inherent contradictions within the subject and the more we
understand the limitations of our knowledge. And so it may be with virtue. Dunne’s
portrayal of phronesis as eccentric may be true insofar as it is centrally important but it
is not without possibility that we might make a similar case for, for example, open-
mindedness. Indeed we might go so far as to suggest that at least some of the other
virtues are eccentric on the grounds that they may not be so easily identifiable as solely
virtues of the intellect or the character (again, open-mindedness is a candidate to
illustrate this point).

Unsurprisingly, in the same way that teaching that aims for the development of good
will requires teachers to have a clear idea of what good will entails, teaching that aims
for the development of virtue in students of nursing requires that nurse teachers aim to
develop an understanding of the nature of virtue. And given that the virtue remains a
contested notion we must allow that this is no easy task. It is, however, a task that we
might find easier when we aim to engage with teaching as a practice in the MacIntyrean
sense.

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