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

Bishop and Scudder reach similar conclusions. They find unconvincing the claims that
nursing is a science. They suggest that the debate is not helped by the general failure of
nurse scholars to distinguish between two uses of the word nursing. They state:
“...nursing refers both to care for patients and to the study of that care. In the nursing
literature, these two senses of nursing are often confused” (Bishop and Scudder 1991 p.
2) (original emphasis).

They go on to make a speculative claim that when some authors argue that nursing is a
science what is really meant is that the study of nursing should be undertaken in a
scientific manner. In the attempt to distinguish between these two senses of nursing
Bishop and Scudder use the term nursing as a discipline to describe the study of nursing
and the term nursing as a practice to describe nursing practice. It should be noted
however that they do recognise, implicitly if not explicitly, that the distinction is not
easy to maintain. Nevertheless, it does provide them with a category in which to include
nursing without doing violence to the generally accepted understandings of what is
meant by science.

However, their attempt to provide an outline of what they mean by a practice as a
category ofhuman activity is insufficiently developed and suggests the term is used, at
least in part, as a convenient way of overcoming what would otherwise be definitional
difficulties. Their tendency to use the term practice in both the semi-technical sense that
they try to develop and in the everyday sense without always distinguishing between the
two leaves the concept vulnerable to a number of different interpretations and
consequently likely to engender confusion.

Thus while their initial intention might be to classify nursing as a practice in order to
distinguish it from the study of nursing, they subsequently develop the idea of a practice
as a categorisation to outline the characteristics of nursing. Bishop and Scudder attempt
a phenomenological interpretation of narrative descriptions provided by practicing
nurses. After asking nurses to provide descriptions “.. .of their most fulfilling
experience in nursing practice” (ibid p. 23) Bishop and Scudder find, perhaps
unsurprisingly, that “.. .nurses are most fulfilled when the moral sense of nursing is
achieved in a personal relationship” (ibid p. 24). Narratives are important, they say,
because “.. .they direct nurses to their lived experience which is often obscured by

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