Caring and justice: a study of two approaches to health care ethics

This article presents an empirical study of approaches to ethical decision-making among nurses and doctors. It takes as its starting point the distinction between the perspectives of care and of justice in ethical thinking, and the view that nurses' thinking will be aligned with the former and doctors' with the latter. It goes on to argue that the differences in these approaches are best understood in terms of the distinction between partialist and impartialist modes of moral thinking. The study seeks to determine the distribution of these modes of thinking between nurses and doctors, and finds that these are no significant differences between them. A 'two-level' philosophical view of the nature of moral thinking is appealed to in order to explain the study findings.