Considerations about theoretical foundation of nursing ethics.

Abstract

The nursing ethics has great importance for the peculiar nature of the nursing discipline. For this reason the ethics is variedly interpreted and treated within nursing knowledge regarding the different disciplinary approaches and interpretations from the nursing teachers.

The contribution doesn’t intend argue the different ethical models in biomedicine, on the contrary to make an outline about the various conceptions in nursing ethics.

Fundamentally these nursing ethics models can be brought back to three principal seams: the ethics like philosophy, the ethics like norm and the ethics like assistance, this last in turn articulated in two trends, the ethics based upon nursing theories and models, and the ethics of “taking care”.

Really, we deduce that all the proposed orientations have some limits since developing the nursing ethics according to a particular orientation means to have the tendency to develop a categorial attitude, with the risk to not go to the root of the fundamental ethical issue: to recognize the peculiarity of every human being.

The author concludes affirming the importance of the different ethical conceptions for the nursing profession, but not without having developed the elements that constitute the base of the ethical phenomenology, that is the natural moral law, the conscience and the morality.

A nurse must develop the elements of morality, particularly the ethical conscience, for practicing with competence his/her profession. Only to these conditions, the nurse could be able to live fully the ethical dimension of his/her service, recognizing the daily problems and ethical dilemmas and attempting to answer according to the orientations that he/she will think more conforming to his/her ethical nature, but always in the respect of the intrinsic value of the human person.