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

that we might easily lose, those things that are most susceptible to harm) then our
vulnerability is increased and our sense of safety compromised. Seneca’s remedy to this
possibility of what we might now call angst is to make sure that we do not place value
on those things for which we cannot offer protection and to be realistic about the
uncertainty of our lives. That is, we should not always expect things to go well for us
but recognise instead the possibility that things may not turn out as we hope. If we are
able to accept a realistic conception of our place in the world (that is, that things are
neither arranged for our benefit nor that the natural order of things is likely to be just)
then we will free ourselves from angst and in so doing render ourselves less vulnerable,
particularly to those things about which it is foolish to consider we have any control¹.

The danger in following this advice is that we might come to live our lives too
passively, accepting all that befalls us with equanimity. In accepting events as inevitable
we become more vulnerable if we fail to take elementary and simple measures to
protect ourselves. It would be folly to think that protective actions are futile because of
a view that ‘what will be will be’. IfI were to walk in the road rather than on the
pavement in the belief that what will happen to me today will happen regardless of any
action I might or might not take to protect myself then it would appear that I have put
myself at risk unnecessarily because by walking in the road I have increased the
chances of being harmed. I have become more vulnerable. Luck may play a part in my
ability to get to the end of a day unscathed but it is not just a matter of luck. It is rather a
mixture of, amongst other things, luck, judgement, and social and political trust.

Luck

Some would consider it good fortune indeed to have been bom in this time and in this
place rather than in some earlier time or in some other place. But if it is the case that
luck is the reason for our survival to date this is not to say that we should be content to
continue to rely solely on luck. In our striving for certainty and safety we continually
battle against mere luck and some even suggest that we make (at least some of) our own
luck. To rely solely on luck would be to accept a fatalistic view of our existence, and
our continued survival as individuals as well as as a species would be sorely tested. If
we are mere captives to fortune we remain at the mercy of events and this leaves us
without any way of predicting which actions might protect us from harms.

¹ For an easily accessible account of the philosophy of Seneca see de Botton (2000). For a more
comprehensive account of stoic philosophy see Nussbaum (1994).

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