Premium
What should other healthcare professions learn from nursing ethics
Author(s) -
Holm Søren
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
nursing philosophy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.367
H-Index - 35
eISSN - 1466-769X
pISSN - 1466-7681
DOI - 10.1111/j.1466-769x.2006.00280.x
Subject(s) - nursing ethics , reductionism , health care , meta ethics , information ethics , normative ethics , applied ethics , nursing , nursing theory , engineering ethics , medical ethics , sociology , epistemology , psychology , medicine , medline , philosophy , political science , law , psychiatry , engineering
This paper analyses the question what other healthcare professions should learn from nursing ethics, e.g. what should medical ethics learn from nursing ethics. I first analyse and reject all strong versions of the claim that nursing ethics is unique, because nursing is a unique practice. I then move to the question of whether the link between nursing ethics and nursing theory can be a model for other areas of healthcare ethics. I provide an analysis of the possibility of creating a theory of medicine and find that there cannot be a theory of medicine, and I argue briefly that this finding is also applicable to nursing. If there cannot be a theory of nursing, this entails that nursing ethics cannot be justifiably based on such a theory. In the final section, I then analyse the success of nursing ethics in resisting certain of the vices of Anglo‐American analytic ethics, in particular the reductionism and individualism that characterizes much of healthcare ethics. I conclude that other healthcare ethics could usefully learn from this aspect of nursing ethics.