This paper's philosophical ideas are developed from a General Nursing Council for England and Wales Trust‐funded study to explore nursing knowledge and wisdom and ways in which these can be translated into clinical practice and fostered in junior nurses. Participants using Carper's (1978) ways of knowing as a framework experienced difficulty conceptualizing a link between the empirics and ethics of nursing. The philosophical problem is how to understand praxis as a moral entity with intrinsic value when so much of value (...) seems to be technical and extrinsic depending on desired ends. Using the Aristotelian terms poesis and praxis can articulate the concerns that the participants as well as Carper (1978) and Dreyfus (in Flyvbjerg, 1991) among others share that certain actions or ways of knowing important for nursing are being devalued and deformed by the importance placed on quantitative data and measurable outcomes. The sense of praxis is a moralized one and most of what nurses do is plausibly on any account of normative ethics a morally good thing; the articulation of the idea of praxis can go some way in showing how it is a part of the discipline of nursing. Nursing's acts as poesis can be a part of how practitioners come to have praxis as phronesis or practical wisdom. So to be a wise nurse, one needs be a wise person. (shrink)

It has been claimed that there are certain acts that nurses as people practising nursing must never do because they are nurses and this is regardless of what the same agent should do; that certain actions are not part of proper nursing practice. The concept of an internal morality has been discussed in relation to medicine and has been used to ground the actions proper to medicine in a realist tradition. Although the concept of an internal morality of nursing is (...) not explicitly mentioned in the literature the underpinning ideas about the proper practice of nursing based on philosophical realism I argue equate with it and a discussion of the method of an internal morality can help to understand how arguments against euthanasia related to the profession of nursing are far from clear. Ultimately, although the idea of particular acts proper to nurses qua nurses is not clear, the concept of an internal morality can help to get practitioners to see how the profession is tightly linked to moral actions, even so the hard problems in bioethics such as the morality of euthanasia remain hard for all and the easy ones easy for all. (shrink)