INTRODUCTION
Most people would be able to offer an outline of what they think nurses do and it is not
unreasonable to suppose they would also be inclined to acknowledge that nurses ought
to be caring, compassionate, trustworthy and so on. This is to say that most people
expect a nurse to be not only competent but also to be a certain kind of person. A
person, that is, with those traits of character consistent with caring for others. This
suggests that people assume caring is a central feature of nursing practice; a view that,
generally speaking, corresponds with the view of nurses themselves. Indeed the idea of
an uncaring nurse is particularly unappealing and is as likely to draw censure as the idea
of an incompetent nurse.
It is the general experience (and expectation) of admission tutors for nursing
programmes that candidates express a desire to be of help to others as a primary reason
for wishing to become a nurse. Given both the history of altruistic motivation for
practice and the enduring idea of caring as a central feature of nursing it might be
supposed that the philosophical basis for nursing practice and education had long been
satisfactorily worked out; after all everybody seems to think they know just what it is
that nurses do and what sort of people nurses should be. Unfortunately the ongoing
debates reflecting fundamental disagreements about the nature of nursing as well as
about the proper aims of nursing practice demonstrate that the philosophical basis is far
from uncontentious. And this has inevitable implications for the general and moral
education of nurses.
This thesis is offered as a contribution to the philosophical basis for nursing practice
and education. I will argue that nursing is an inherently moral practice and this places
moral obligations on individual nurses to cultivate the sorts of dispositions necessary to
ensure nursing actions enable rather than diminish human flourishing. So expressed
these sentiments might seem merely to reflect long cherished ideals of nursing yet, as
will be seen, the application of these ideals both in the practice and the education of
nurses is far from straightforward. Amongst the features of this thesis that bear directly
on the practice and education of nurses, five are of particular interest.
First, I note the looseness with which the idea of the vulnerability of those in receipt of
nursing practice is used is unhelpful. This leads to a preliminary analysis of the nature
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