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

this thesis and is essential to this particular chapter in which I pursue the claim that
there is benefit in understanding nursing as a practice in the technical sense in which
Alasdair MacIntyre uses the term.

In Chapter 2 I claimed that nursing is concerned with enabling flourishing of more-
than-ordinarily vulnerable persons. In this chapter I make the further claim that, as a
consequence of working towards the flourishing of more-than-ordinarily vulnerable
persons, nurses who engage with nursing as a practice (in the MacIntyrean sense) are,
themselves, enabled to flourish as human beings. Of course, these claims must be
considered against both the concept of a MacIntyrean practice and the idea of human
flourishing. Thus I begin this chapter with an outline of the nature of MacIntyre’s
concept of a practice and his account of human flourishing. For MacIntyre, rational
capacities play a central role in human flourishing and this seems unnecessarily to
exclude more-than-ordinarily vulnerable persons.

Following these discussions I return to the claim made in Chapter 1 that any attempt to
categorise nursing as a science is fundamentally misconceived. Despite the fact that
many people think they know what it is that nurses do and/or what nursing is, a history
of (presumably) unsuccessful attempts to define nursing testifies to the difficulty of the
task. Thus I do not set out to define nursing as such for that task has eluded far more
accomplished scholars. Rather, my purpose here is to offer some considerations of the
nature of nursing and to note, in particular, some of the reasons why nursing cannot be a
science. I will argue that understanding nursing as a MacIntyrean practice in response to
human extra-vulnerability allows for the inclusion of the idea that nursing is centrally
concerned with human flourishing which, as I suggested in Chapter 2, is a legitimate
end of nursing. As such then nursing as a practice in which cultivation of the virtues is
centrally important is presented as an alternative to the increasingly voiced, but
mistaken, idea that nursing is a science.

Practices

For MacIntyre (1985) a practice is a form of human activity where possibilities exist for
individuals to move towards a good life. His is a teleological vision of a good human
life in which individuals might engage with a range of complementary practices which
includes engaging with the traditions of those practices. Such engagements would, as a
consequence, reduce the fragmentation of individual experience that has become the

64

<<   61   62   63   64   65   66   67   >>

More intriguing information