On Alan Armstrong's ‘Towards a Strong Virtue Ethics for Nursing Practice’

Armstrong's (2006) ‘Towards a strong virtue ethics for nursing practice’ is focused on how the practice of nursing necessitates morally good character traits as virtues including the intellectual virtue phronesis. Because of this, he claims, nursing ethics should also be grounded in virtue ethics. Illness creates a unique phenomenon that involves a special therapeutic as helping relationship necessitating good interpersonal skills and patient-centred care that, for the role of a nurse and nursing ethics, requires a focus on persons and relationships, character and emotions. Obligation, act centred normative theories are, according to Armstrong, incomplete and inadequate for nursing practice. They are incomplete and inadequate as moral theories because they ignore, or at least do not give appropriate moral importance to, other factors of life such as character, moral education, emotions and relationships. Armstrong grounds his virtue ethics in a ‘moralised’ eudaimonia. This leads to problems of getting from good for to good. It is suggested a non eudaimonistic, virtue ethics by Swanton might be just what Armstrong is after but as an account of ethics not morality.