professional education and literature that inclines nurses to think and speak objectively”
(ibid p. 28).
From this work they identify a certain primacy about the moral aspect of nursing and
because they start with a question that asks what it is that nurses find fulfilling, they
bring to light questions about the relationship between self-regard and other-regard in
nursing practice. They suggest that for many nurses the essence of what it means to be a
nurse is to be in some sense fulfilled in their professional practice. Bishop and Scudder
accept this self-regarding aspect of the meaning of nursing as unproblematic despite the
challenge it poses for the general professional injunction that it is the interests of clients,
rather than the self, that should guide the practice of a nurse.
Following Gadamer, Bishop and Scudder note that practices . .attempt to bring about
good in the world” (ibid p. 32) and they contrast this with technologies (that is, applied
sciences) which have the potential to be used for good or evil; and it is for this reason
that it is inappropriate to classify nursing as an applied science. The good that nursing
seeks is the well-being of individual patients which characterises nursing as a moral
enterprise with an associated moral obligations on the part of individual nurses to
provide excellent care. Nursing is thus a caring practice that aims at the good of those
who find themselves in receipt of nursing. However, as Edwards notes, . .this is a
plausible claim, although not one which distinguishes nursing from other ‘caring
practices’ such as parenting, social work and so on...” (Edwards 2001 p. 164).
In their outline of nursing as a practice Bishop and Scudder do acknowledge the
contribution OfMacIntyre as well as Gadamer to their thinking both about the nature of
a practice in general and about nursing as a practice in particular. They suggest that in
MacIntyre’s terms nursing is obviously a practice. Others including Sellman (1994,
2000), Wainwright (1997), and Edwards (2001) have also claimed that nursing is a
practice in the MacIntyrean sense.
The claim which will now come under scrutiny is made precisely because the dominant
accounts do not sufficiently capture the essence of what sort of thing nursing is. As a
result I will claim here not only that nursing is a practice but also that nursing can only
be properly understood as a practice. I have argued elsewhere (Sellman 2000) that the
features MacIntyre identifies as constitutive of a practice are features recognisable
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