This paper introduces the notion of open‐mindedness before proceeding to outline its value to the practical activity of nursing. An argument is constructed to point to the desirability of the development of a virtue of open‐mindedness in nurses in order to complement evidence‐based practice. Attention is drawn to two failures of open‐mindedness (the vices of closed‐mindedness and credulousness), which have the potential both to restrict autonomous practice and to cause harm.

Within the nursing ethics literature, there has for some time now been a focus on the role and importance of character for nursing. An overarching rationale for this is the need to examine the sort of person one must be if one is to nurse well or be a good nurse. How one should be to live well or live a/the good life and to nurse well or be a good nurse seems to necessitate a focus on an agent's character (...) as well as actions because character is (for the most part) expressed in action (e.g. seeLaird). This paper will give an overview of the reasons for the role and importance of character in nursing practice and explain its relation to nursing's frequent use of virtue ethics in order to recommend caution. While the paper agrees that the role of character is important in nursing caution is needed in both how much moral and thus normative, emphasis is being placed on the psychology of character and on the drift to virtue ethics. The psychological which may be explanatory needs to be linked with the normative, and a justification for the normative is needed. A justification as virtue ethics is contested, and nursing practice does not need to take on this explanatory and justificatory burden.A tentative proposal raised but not discussed in depth in this paper is that when an ultimate explanation or explanatory ground is needed, nursing practice leads quite naturally to a form of consequentialism as well as a realist metaethic. On this account, there are two levels of moral thinking, and nursing practice entails the virtues at one level and leads quite naturally to moral thinking at another more critical level of the criterion of what makes something right and good independently of character. (shrink)

At least since Aristotle, phronesis (practical wisdom) and poetics (making or creating) have been understood as essentially different activities, one moral the other (in itself) non-moral. Today, if anything, this distinction is sharpened by a Romantic association of poetics with inner subjective expression. Recent revivals of Aristotelian ethics sometimes allow for poetic dimensions of ethics, but these are still separated from practical wisdom per se. Through a fresh reading of phronesis in the French hermeneutical phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur, I argue that (...) phronesis should be viewed as at least in part poetic at its very core. That is, phronesis deals with the fundamentally tragic human situation of moral incommensurability, and it responds to this by making or creating new moral meaning. Such a poetics of practical wisdom helps phronesis stand up to significant and important critiques made of it by a range of modernists and post-modernists, pointing a way forward for some important contemporary moral debates. (shrink)