The ethics of nursing care and 'the ethic of care'

Recent discussions concerning the ethics of nursing care have gained added impetus from articulations of the so-called 'ethic of care' in moral philosophy. This paper addresses the question of recognizing and elaborating the ethics of nursing care by exploring the problems and the possibilities of these intersecting discourses. In the first part of the paper it is argued that appropriation of 'the ethic of care' by nursing theorists as the central value of nursing, in contradistinction to other moral values such as beneficence or justice, runs the risk of reinforcing the conventional approaches to ethics that 'the ethic of care' seeks to overturn. Central to 'the ethic of care' is the recognition that caring entails a focus on the particularities and context of the relationships in which it is expressed. Accordingly the application of a unitary concept of care to the context of nursing relations may seriously distort their diverse and complex-specific ethical possibilities. The dynamic complexity of nursing ethics may be more adequately understood by working through an array of specific examples of nursing practice highlighting the differences and similarities between them and other ethical practices of care. Experience of a set of examples in this way will draw attention to the multiplicity, ambiguity, and particularity of the ethics of nursing care. In the second part of the paper a beginning is made on this project by addressing the work of several different theorists of care who have examined different practices of nursing from the overlapping perspectives of nurses, patients and the socio-historical construction of their relationships.