Nursing responsibilities and social justice: an analysis in support of disciplinary goals

Social justice is asserted as a responsibility of the nursing profession. However, a reliable conception of social justice that can undergird practice, research, education, and policy endeavors has proved elusive. We discuss this as a problem for the profession and propose Powers and Faden's model of social justice as useful for nursing purposes because of its focus on exploring and rectifying underlying causes of injustice as they lie within the fabric of society. Their model asserts 6 essential dimensions of well-being as universal human needs. These dimensions are interrelated and nonhierarchical. A serious deficiency in any one affects other dimensions and interferes with the ability to experience "a minimally decent life." The model is applied to the problem of child abuse and the effects of its aftermath on well-being as an example of its potential for structuring nursing knowledge development, practice, and policy initiatives.