the busy health care professional should pay attention to and what evidence should be
discarded or ignored. Being open-minded allows for the possibility that there is some
evidence that is currently discarded or ignored which should not be; in other words
being open-minded about sources of evidence militates against a narrow view of what
counts as evidence. And this, as I argue in Chapter 5, is a necessary condition of
professional practice. But there is more, for having a general disposition to be open-
minded is essential to professional practice precisely because it makes less likely those
reactionary tendencies that lead to narrow-mindedness or credulousness. And this
makes fulfilling the obligation for each registered nurse to remain up-to-date and
competent easier to accomplish, for the open-minded nurse will be aware that not only
is what is considered best practice likely to change over time but also that current
(possibly cherished) practices may turn out to be wrong or inappropriate. Moreover,
open-mindedness is a pre-requisite for professional phronesis and if professional
phronesis is a legitimate aim for nursing education then the neglect of attempts to
encourage the appropriate amount of open-mindedness among nurses will be a wilful
disregard of a necessary component of professional practice.
Education for professional virtue
For Aristotle, it only makes sense to think about ethics as separate from practical and
political life in order to study the inter-relationships and to enable cultivation of the
virtues that go to make up attempts to live a good life. This is to be contrasted with the
modem tendency of categorisation and fragmentation that leads to ethics perceived as
an academic discipline with its own terminology and nuances that separate it from the
everyday practical world in which we live. Where ethics is taught to nurses in this
modem sense of ethics as a separate subject then students will and do Stmggle to make
sense of the sometimes daunting theoretical positions of various protagonists. It might
be overly simplistic and to caricature to say that nurses want formulaic answers to
pressing practical problems rather than lengthy and complex treatises on, for example,
subtle theoretical distinctions between different versions of, say, naturalism or
prescriptivism but given the busy lives of most nurses it is a view that does not stray too
far from reality. Thus it is not that the teaching of ethics to nurses is inappropriate, far
from it; rather it is that the teaching of ethics to nurses in the modem sense of a subject
separated from its practical application is inappropriate.
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