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. see Laird). 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.

To feel cared about people need to feel 'visible' as though they matter. Nurses need to be alert to problems that may arise if their 'moral vision' is influenced by ideas of desert and how much the patient is doing to help himself or herself.

There is currently a great deal of ambiguity regarding the difference between the role of clinical nurse specialist and advanced nurse practitioner. In distinguishing one title from another, factors such as the educational requirements of such, what the role involves, who the client is and whether the role encroaches on a doctor's role are discussed. This paper sets out the factors that are seen by some as significant in distinguishing between a clinical nurse specialist and advanced nurse practitioner.

The conduct of nurse managers, and health service managers more widely, has been subject to scrutiny and critique because of high-profile organisational failures in healthcare. This raises concerns about the practice of nursing management and the use of codes of professional and managerial conduct. Some responses to such failures seem to assume that codes of conduct will ensure or at least increase the likelihood that ethical management will be practised. Codes of conduct are general principles and rules of normative standards, including ethical standards, and guides for action of agents in particular roles. Nurse managers seem to stride two roles. Contra some accounts of the roles of a professional (nurse) and that of a manager, it is claimed that there is no intrinsic incompatibility of the roles though there is always the possibility that it could become so and likewise for codes of conduct. Codes of conduct can be used to support nurse managers in making practical decisions via an ‘outside in’ approach with an emphasis on the use of principles and an ‘inside out’ approach with an emphasis on the agent’s character. It is claimed that both approaches are necessary, especially as guides to ethical action. However, neither is sufficient for action because judgement and choice will always be required (principles always underdetermine action) as will a conducive environment that positively influences good judgement by being supportive of the basic principles and values of healthcare institutions. The response to the Covid-19 pandemic has created a unique set of circumstances in which the practical judgement, including ethical judgement, of nurse managers at all levels is being tested. However, the pandemic could be a turning point because staff and institutions (temporarily) freed from managerialism have demonstrated excellent practice supportive of ethical and other practical decision making. Organisations need to learn from this post pandemic.

This paper will examine a claim that nursing is united by its moral stance. The claim is that there are moral constraints on nurses' actions as people practising nursing (nurses qua nurses) and that they are in some way different from both what for now can be called standard morality and also different from the person's own moral views who also happens to be a nurse, hence the defining and unifying factor for nursing. I will begin by situating the claim within the broader area about the need for a definition to state features that are essential to all and only members of its class. This will highlight the fact that there are two distinct types of definition used by authors seeking to find a unity for nursing. One type of definition has to do with goals or purposes given to nursing and the other with ends discovered as nursing. But even if there are ends waiting to be discovered a particular practical concern is how we can have knowledge of them. I will suggest that knowledge by intuition is plausible but that as things currently stand in moral epistemology it will not provide the unifying ground for nursing. Then I will argue that in the latter approach to definition a certain account of human nature has been advanced in order to provide features that are there to be discovered and so not dependent on human beings for the definition or classification. However, such an attempt to define nursing cannot do what is wanted. Rather than the account of human nature grounding morality and doing so for nursing, the account of human nature itself relies upon a prior account of morality. Because of this it loses its supposed ground of unity for the profession. Nursing is not united by its moral stance especially if this is understood in a strong sense as unique moral stance, but as things currently stand in moral epistemology this is not necessarily a bad thing for practitioners or patients.