to what we are told about our own inadequacies and to reply with the same
carefulness for the facts. In other words we have to accept as necessary
components of any practice with internal goods and standards of excellence the
virtues of justice, courage and honesty.
(MacIntyre 1985 p. 191)
In the brief discussion that follows these words MacIntyre notes that dishonesty
between those engaged in a practice jeopardises relationships between practitioners in
terms of the pursuit of the communal goods of that practice. Similarly, a failure of
justice or of courage damages the relationships between those engaged in the practice
and renders the pursuit of the internal goods meaningless. For, as he points out earlier,
the pursuit of internal goods is not competitive in the way that the pursuit of external
goods often is. Pursuit of the prize money for winning a major chess championship
inevitably requires that one person’s success is everybody else’s failure whereas the
internal goods of a practice are freely available to all those who engage with it as a
practice. Any competition that exists within practices is generally aimed at the pursuit
of excellence within that practice and as well as being of benefit for the individual and
this is ofbenefιt for the community of practitioners and beyond. In the case of nursing,
the benefit extends to individual patients as well as to the health and welfare of the
general community.
If nursing is a practice then the virtues of honesty, justice and courage are of central
importance and the cultivation of these three virtues is an essential part of what nurses
engaged with nursing as a practice must pursue. That we should anticipate that nurses
be honest and just is, I think, unsurprising. We would hope that when we, or our loved
ones, are more-than-ordinarily vulnerable we can be confident that the nurses will not
abuse their relative position of power. We assume that the nurses will not steal our
precious belongings, we hope they will be truthful with us (or at the very least not
deceitful), we hope that we will get our fair share of what ever resources it is in the
power of nurses to allocate (including their time and attention) and moreover, we hope
that the nurses will care for us with a good grace, that they will have a good will toward
us and not treat us as merely some interesting case of x or as some widget that needs
fixing. These are actually quite demanding expectations but one thing that is clear is that
within the general expectations of nurses is that they will be in some sense honourable
in their intentions toward us.
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