Moral guidance
While the teaching of ethics to nurses may contribute to nursing students’ knowledge
and understanding of morality, what I have termed the ‘application of theory’
approaches thus far discussed do not and cannot constitute moral education as here
conceived. Thus it seems that something more that the mere teaching of ethics is a
necessary component of nursing education if Everyman’s expectation that nurses
exhibit certain sorts of caring dispositions can be met. In other words, in addition to the
teaching of ethics there is a requirement for some form of moral guidance or moral
education. However, Holt and Long reject the idea of moral guidance as they argue that
it is precisely the teaching of ethics as a Subjectjust like any other subject that is
necessary if nursing students are to be able to make ethical judgements “.. .supported by
good reasons for accepting a belief if Suchjudgements are to be considered more than
just simple opinions” (Holt and Long 1999 p. 247). Further they argue for training in
philosophical method of “... how to critically evaluate the beliefs and arguments
advanced on ethical issues” (ibid) and this is, of course, necessary if nurses are to be
able to spot fallacious arguments supporting questionable practices. Holt and Long’s
paper is partly an attack on ‘armchair’ ethicist approaches to the teaching of ethics
where abstract ethical theory is used to proclaim judgments from afar in ways that
students of nursing will find obscure and divorced from their clinical experiences, and
they are quite right to emphasise the need to locate ethical discussion in the framework
of clinical practice if such discussion is to be meaningful to nursing students. But they
go on to differentiate between on the one hand the teaching of ethics as a legitimate
activity and on the other an inappropriate and unhelpful tendency of nurse educators to
give moral guidance. They do not clarify exactly what they mean by ‘moral guidance’
but it can inferred from their paper that they use the term to indicate teaching that gives
prominence to “.. .imposing moral guidance and lists of acceptable behaviour ...” (ibid
p. 249): an approach that might be likened to moral training rather than moral education.
And if this is what they mean then they are correct in saying that mere moral guidance
is unhelpful in the education of nurses because it is inconsistent with the educational
aim of enabling nurses to engage in independent practical reasoning in order to
determine what should be done to whom in difficult clinical situations.
They claim that moral guidance may be an acceptable function of teachers of primary
school children because children of such age have not sufficiently developed the
cognitive capacities necessary for moral reasoning. This view seems to be underpinned
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