In Chapter 6 I will say something about how an alternative approach to the teaching of
ethics might be pursued but there is much to be said about nursing first and the
following chapters will set the scene for that later discussion of the moral education of
nurses. Suffice it to say at this point that there is indeed a place for the moral education
of nurses and some of the reasons for this have been rehearsed in this chapter. Nurses
often operate at the margins of human suffering and being exposed to human frailty in
ways that few, if any, other occupational groups are, requires that nurses be not only
clear about the purposes of nursing practice but also about the need for acting in ways
that accord with the pursuit of human goods, particularly where achievement of those
goods is challenged by the additional vulnerability of being a patient. This requires
more than a mere absence of vice in nurses qua nurses but, at a minimum, it requires the
practice of professional virtue. For some, professional virtue will be a reflection of, or
may lead to, full virtue in their lives which would be to fulfil those human goods
leading to eudaimon - translated to mean something like, happiness, the good life, well-
being, or human flourishing. This, not unsurprisingly, is likely to be rare in our post-
modern age and I should make it clear at the outset that it is not the purpose of this
thesis to propose nursing as a way to eudaimon. Nevertheless, such an outcome would
not be inconsistent with the primary function of nursing understood here as a response
to human vulnerability. The idea that patients are vulnerable is a generally uncontested
notion and yet what is meant by expressions such as ‘the vulnerable patient’ is rarely
explicated. Thus there is a need for an exploration of the idea of human vulnerability
and it is this that forms the content of the next chapter.
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