and not found wanting. Such is the stuff of heroes and many find inspiration from this
sort of admiration of those who can act well in spite of considerable difficulties.
Professional virtues
It can be said then that general virtue offers the possibility of guiding normal everyday
moral behaviour but seems insufficient grounding for acceptable moral behaviour
within the professional practice of nursing. This is not a failure of virtue itself for, as
implied in the foregoing discussion, ordinary everyday life (at least in 21st century
western liberal democracies) rarely provides a sufficient test of character and makes it
difficult to distinguish between genuine disposition and mere situation-induced habit.
Thus, arguably, modernity fails virtue by not providing sufficient opportunities for
individuals to develop a sense of general virtue beyond that required for ordinary
everyday living. Working as a nurse involves being confronted with dilemmas for
which a poorly developed sense of general virtue provides insufficient guidance for
moral action. While many have attempted to fill the resulting vacuum of moral guidance
with deontological, utilitarian, principle-based, or rights-based ethical approaches,
Potter (2002) reminds us that, at best, the application of these moral theories has only
ever been partly successful. If general virtue cannot yet compete with the more
established moral theories then perhaps a consideration of virtue as it applies to
situations beyond the ordinary will offer a fresh perspective. To differentiate between
everyday general virtue (that is, the everyday, sometimes poorly developed, sense of
virtue that suffices for normal everyday living) and the idea of a form of ‘extended
virtue’ (that is, a well developed sense of virtue that provides guidance for practising
nurses), I shall use the term professional virtue for the latter.
Clearly, there are problems with the use of this terminology for the notion of ‘extended’
or ‘professional’ virtue as I have defined it is merely what others would call virtue. In
virtue ethics there is no real distinction to be made, one either has a virtue or one does
not. And if one does not have a virtue, one can choose to aim for it, or one can ignore it
or be indifferent to it. This much can be admitted, but in talking about professional
virtues I am not attempting to deny this characterisation rather I am attempting a
discussion of the virtues in relation to the professional practice of nursing. It is not that
there is necessarily any substantive difference between a virtue and a professional virtue
to be debated but it is to indicate that professional practice challenges the expression of
virtue precisely because of the contrast between the exercise of virtue in normal
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