Clinical sensitivity: the inseparability of ethical perceptiveness and clinical knowledge

This article argues that there is an important connection between ethical sensitivity and clinical competency in nursing. This is more than a defense for ethical attitudes and virtues in clinical practice, however. I will show in what way ethical sensitivity is important not only to moral judgment, but to professional clinical knowledge and judgment as well. Drawing on central insights from continental philosophy, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas and Foucault, as well as classical virtue theory, the article elucidates the inseparability of ethical sensitivity and clinical knowledge in nursing. Ethical sensitivity has bearing upon clinical knowledge and awareness in two important ways. First, what we consider relevant clinical knowledge and therapeutic measures frequently encounter the realities of clinical conditions, realities which embody certain moral qualities and appeal to moral values. In clinical nursing, it is important to understand how this encounter between professional knowledge and moral values informs clinical action, making it morally as well as professionally proper. Second, sensitivity to vulnerability qualifies clinical knowledge in the way that it alerts clinical sensitivity altogether. Perception of morally salient features informs the nurse about significant changes in the patient's pathological condition. The ability to be touched morally by the patient's condition, his or her vulnerability or vitality and positive experience is epistemologically and prognostically significant.