[Ethics and nursing. A contribution to nursing education]

Given today's developments in public health, nursing will be forced to manage different care services in the future. Nurses' growing responsibilities and the complexity of decision-making increase the necessity of a discussion of ethics in nursing. Ethics should help nurses solve moral conflicts. This article (an excerpt from a thesis) describes one possible way to improve ethical decision-making: by using casuistry as an attempt to help nurses bridge the gulf between general moral rules and specific problems in specific cases, for example the conflict between respecting autonomy and the obligation to care, one of the main problems of decision-making. This problem is analyzed according to Thiroux's ethical principles. The limits of casuistry lie in the fact that each person is accountable for his own decision in a specific situation without having a relevant context to refer to.