it could be otherwise. We should, he might say, recognise within ourselves that it is a
mistake to consider what is to be the same as what should be.
Nevertheless, it is true that there is some ambiguity about this within After Virtue, the
book where MacIntyre first outlines the nature of practices. He appears to use the
example of teaching as a practice when he claims, when referring specifically to
practices, that justice is a core virtue of a practice. His example of the professor who is
obliged to mark students’ work on merit and who is therefore exhibiting a proper
standard of excellence seems to be a claim that teaching is a practice. And later, and
again when talking specifically about practices, he uses teaching as an example when
explaining the virtue of patience, “... the patience of... a teacher with a slow pupil...”
(MacIntyre 1985 p. 202) is, he says, an example of how a practice makes sense of a
virtue (in this case the virtue of patience). For if not located within a practice there is no
answer to the question of the purpose of patience.
But while there may remain disagreement on what is and what is not a practice, and
while the categorisation tendency is recognised as a danger, the current attempt to
characterise nursing as a practice is undertaken for reasons familiar to many teachers.
That is, that many nurses, like many teachers, will find meaning in the idea of nursing
as a practice precisely because it offers the potential for the nature of nursing to be
captured in a rich conceptualisation which many find absent in existing accounts. But
before proceeding with the discussion about nursing as a practice it is necessary to
consider what is meant by the term human flourishing. This is necessary for two related
reasons. The first is that the claim that nursing is a practice rests, at least in part, on a
recognition that human flourishing is a legitimate aim of nursing. The second reason is
that human flourishing is central to MacIntyre’s project and any attempt to understand
practices without understanding the relationship of practices to human flourishing is
likely to be only partial at best and to misunderstand the importance of practices at
worst. For it is by participation in practices that human beings are most likely to find the
possibility of flourishing.
Human flourishing
The idea that nursing should be concerned with the well-being of patients is
Uncontentious and equates with popular conceptions of human flourishing. However, it
is not yet clear what is meant here by human flourishing. There is a vast literature on
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