ABSTRACT
The development of nursing ethics as a field of inquiry has largely relied on theories of medical ethics that use autonomy, beneficence, and/or justice as foundational ethical principles. This chapter challenges the presumption of medical ethics and its associated system of moral justification as an appropriate model for nursing ethics. It argues that the value foundations of nursing ethics are located within the existential phenomenon of human caring within the nurse/patient relationship instead of in models of patient good or rights-based notions of autonomy as articulated in prominent theories of medical ethics. Foregoing recourse to medical ethics, a few nurses have attempted to articulate other foundational values for the moral practice of nursing. The model of caring relevant to the development of nursing ethics is the moral-point-of-view (MPV) version. Building on the ideas of Gadow, Jean Watson proposes a slightly different view of caring as the foundation of "nursing as a human science".
