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

If we follow MacIntyre’s account, we might say that because humans need functioning
independent practical reasoning to flourish qua humans then the flourishing of more-
than-ordinarily vulnerable persons must be of a different order. This would allow for a
range of requirements for human flourishing dependent upon a categorisation of human
beings as, less or more, compromised practical reasoners. So we might have, for
example, a notion that those persons in a coma can only be said to flourish as humans-
in-a-coma and not as humans as such. While this has some superficial attraction it
creates problems of classification of humans as beings who approximate, to different
degrees, an ideal form of being human; that is, the independent practical reasoner. This
view seems perilously close to a form of ‘moral apartheid’ in which differentiated value
might exist for different categories of humans with all the peculiar moral judgements
(and what are now regarded as morally abhorrent actions) that have accompanied
regimes with such perspectives. Apart from anything else, such categorisations of
humans would inevitably remain arbitrary and, most likely, capricious. Even MacIntyre
would admit, I think, that the independent practical reasoner is to be considered an
aspiration rather than a reality; or at least that there exist few fully developed
independent practical reasoners.

More-than-ordinarily vulnerable people and MacIntyre’s account of human
flourishing

Unsurprisingly, MacIntyre’s account of human flourishing includes, as a requirement,
the potential for purposeful engagement in practices. Such engagement is made possible
by the development of the essential human capacity for independent practical reasoning.
And for MacIntyre it is engagement with practices that enables the development of
virtue. As MacIntyre points out, to engage with a practice it is necessary to recognise
the practice has internal goods and to Ieam that we must cultivate particular virtues if
we are to gain access to those goods. This requires a degree of humility and suggests
learning is itself a practice for there are undoubtedly internal goods to be had in what
Marton and Saljo (1976) described as ‘deep’ as opposed to ‘surface’ learning. Further,
these internal goods only seem to be available to those who understand learning as
something worthwhile in and for itself. It is the case that ‘deep’ learning encourages the
development of the very virtues that enable learning as a practice (and that enable
practices in general), including honesty, courage and justice as well as independent
practical reasoning. This does seem to raise a problem in explaining the development of

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