The Society for Nursing Ethics International (SONEI) is currently featuring a series of blog posts exploring articles on nursing ethics published in Advances in Nursing Science (ANS) during the journal’s first 12 years. The series began on July 28 and will continue through February 2027. As each post is published, it becomes part of the ANS Ethics Collection on SONEI.org.
As Editor of ANS during the years these articles were published, I was delighted as each article was submitted, peer reviewed, and ultimately appeared in the journal. What I did not fully appreciate at the time was the significance these articles would have as a collection. Looking back, I now see how powerfully they affirm nursing ethics as a relational ethic—an ethic that remains at the heart of our discipline, in both theory and practice.
These articles also illuminate the creative processes involved in ethical knowing in nursing: exploring and clarifying the meanings embedded in our ethical knowledge, engaging in dialogue about those meanings, and examining and justifying the ethical and moral foundations of nursing practice.
The collection begins with an article by Barbara Carper—but perhaps not the Carper article you might expect. It is not her well-known and frequently cited article on the fundamental patterns of knowing in nursing, published in the first issue of ANS. Rather, it is her article published in the journal’s third issue, “The Ethics of Caring.”
Carper had worked as a nurse anesthetist throughout her doctoral education, and that practice experience, combined with her insights into the nature of nursing knowledge, formed the foundation for the perspective she developed in this article. She argued that specialization and technology in health care are inherently depersonalizing and that caring relationships between people and health care providers offer an essential counterforce to this dehumanization. Yet there is no assurance that every health care relationship will be humane and caring. Nursing’s distinctive and well-established ethic of caring in relationship, she proposed, provides that grounding for nursing.
Taken together, the articles in the ANS Ethics Collection affirm that nursing’s moral action arises from the encounter between nurse and patient—and that this encounter is always situated within a larger human, social, and political context. Several interrelated experiences and commitments shape this moral action:
- The experience of relationship—knowing the other and being known by the other; knowing the life story that has been interrupted.
- The experience of the social and political context; knowing the social structure within which that interruption occurs.
- The desire to diminish the possibility of dehumanization in the encounter.
- The desire to prevent dehumanizing conditions and to create humanizing environments—locally and beyond.
- The desire to flourish, even in the context of human suffering.
- The desire to create conditions that reduce human suffering, promote flourishing, and protect the environment and community.
- The experience of struggling to find meaning, mutuality, and understanding.
- The struggle to create policies that benefit all who share the human condition. (Chinn, 2018)
These ideas are not simply part of nursing’s history. They invite us to consider what nursing ethics asks of us now—and how the ethical knowledge developed within our discipline can inform our responses to the circumstances nurses, patients, families, and communities face today.
I hope you will become an active participant in this unfolding dialogue. Follow the ANS Ethics Collection on SONEI.org, read the featured articles and reflections, and add your own commentary and responses. The collection gives us an opportunity not only to revisit important contributions to nursing ethics, but also to consider together what they mean for nursing today.
AI Disclosure: ChatGPT was used to refine grammar, punctuation, flow and focus
Sources
Carper, B. (1979). The ethics of caring. ANS. Advances in Nursing Science, 1(3), 11–19. https://journals.lww.com/advancesinnursingscience/citation/1979/04000/the_ethics_of_caring.4.aspx
Chinn, P. L. (2018). The evolution of nursing’s ethics of caring. In W. Rosa, S. Horton-Deutsch, & J. Watson (Eds.), A Handbook for Caring Science (pp. 37–52). Springer Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1891/9780826133892.0003