title: What should other healthcare professions learn from nursing ethics.
abstract: This paper analyses the question what other healthcare professions should learn from nursing ethics, e.g. what should medical ethics learn from nursing ethics. I first analyse and reject all strong versions of the claim that nursing ethics is unique, because nursing is a unique practice. I then move to the question of whether the link between nursing ethics and nursing theory can be a model for other areas of healthcare ethics. I provide an analysis of the possibility of creating a theory of medicine and find that there cannot be a theory of medicine, and I argue briefly that this finding is also applicable to nursing. If there cannot be a theory of nursing, this entails that nursing ethics cannot be justifiably based on such a theory. In the final section, I then analyse the success of nursing ethics in resisting certain of the vices of Anglo-American analytic ethics, in particular the reductionism and individualism that characterizes much of healthcare ethics. I conclude that other healthcare ethics could usefully learn from this aspect of nursing ethics.
authors.affiliation: Cardiff Law School, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK. holms@cardiff.ac.uk
authors.forename: Søren
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Holm
mesh_terms: D026689:Ethical Analysis; D028663:Ethical Theory; D004992:Ethics, Medical; D004993:Ethics, Nursing; D004995:Ethics, Professional; D019513:Feminism; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D033183:Interdisciplinary Communication; D008128:Logic; D016294:Models, Nursing; D009742:Nursing Theory; D010687:Philosophy, Nursing; D017009:Professional Autonomy; D012660:Semantics; D019366:Western World