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

Teaching for trustworthiness and open-mindedness

We have seen that if the nurse teacher is engaged in their practice as a practice then
they will approximate what I have termed the professional phronimos and what Steutel
and Spiecker call the virtuous tutor. In their conception of Aristotelian habituation it is
the virtuous tutor who can help the learner to Ieam what it is that virtue requires of them
and this is important because merely learning to habitually act as if one were honest,
just or courageous only serves the limited purpose of moral training. And as we have
seen moral training does not take sufficient account of human moral agency. If it were
possible to train a student to always tell the truth then we will have failed that student by
repressing her or his moral agency. For she or he will have not been given the
opportunity to exercise judgement and discretion. Even on a Kantian account, mere
training of moral habits denies moral agency because without a rational understanding
of the ‘rule’ of truth telling, the mere act of rule following has no moral force. Whereas
it is part of the conception of the professional phronimos that she or he has the wisdom
to recognise what the exercise of a virtue requires in a particular situation. The virtuous
tutor then illustrates by what she or he does in everyday practice the exercise of the
virtues necessary for that practice. In this way the professional phronimos will not only
seek to enable the student to Ieam the ‘facts’ of trustworthiness but also what
tmstworthiness requires; will not only teach the student what open-mindedness is but
also how to go about being open-minded. This can take various forms but one essential
aspect involves teaching the student that there are judgements to be made in the exercise
of both tmstworthiness and open-mindedness and the way that the virtuous tutor goes
about being tmstworthy and open-minded in different situations is instructive.

Learning to be trustworthy

It will be instructive in the first instance in the relationship between the nurse teacher
and the student. As Nancy Potter points out one thing that being tmstworthy requires of
us is that we respond in trustworthy ways to betrayals of trust; that we make sincere
attempts to recover trust when tmst relationships have broken down. We can betray a
trust in many ways and in some cases we may not even be aware of the breach. We may
break a tmst inadvertently when, for example, we are striving to Ieam to be tmstworthy;
we may break a trust deliberately in professional life as we face situations in which a
breach of trust is justified or inevitable; or we may breach a tmst without realising that
the other party has placed their trust in us. Arguably, the nature of professional working
life is such that unasked for or unacknowledged tmst may accompany unrealistic or

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