From Care to Justice: Reframing Nursing Education Through Relational Ethics and Epistemic Inclusion

Caring forms the philosophical and moral foundation of nursing, yet nursing education often reproduces the epistemic exclusion it professes to resist. Writing as a nursing educator and disability justice advocate, I employ philosophical hermeneutics and critical analysis to interpret nursing education through the intersecting frameworks of Noddings' ethics of care, critical disability theory, and Fricker's account of epistemic injustice. I argue that the faculty-student relationship functions as a moral microcosm in which nursing's ethical identity is either enacted or fractured, and that for students with learning disabilities, authentic caring requires a fundamental reorientation from benevolent provision to relational reciprocity. Through analysis of the hidden curriculum as a site of moral withdrawal, I develop the distinction between 'caring for' and 'caring with', proposing co-agency as the relational and institutional expression of genuine caring pedagogy. I further examine how bureaucratic structures and the feminized distribution of moral labour constrain relational care, and argue that structural reform is a moral necessity rather than a procedural adjustment. The paper concludes by integrating care and justice as mutually constitutive: justice is the structural expression of care, and care is the relational practice through which justice is enacted in everyday educational life. Caring pedagogy is not preparatory to ethical nursing practice; it is one of its earliest expressions.