Nursing Ethics: Normative Foundations, Advanced Concepts, and Emerging Issues

This edited volume comprises twenty original essays in nursing ethics by an international, interdisciplinary group of scholars, researchers, and clinicians. The volume is the first wide-ranging, advanced edited volume in nursing ethics that explores the normative foundations and frameworks of nursing ethics, philosophical views of ethical knowledge, practical identity, moral agency in nursing, and emerging ethical issues in nursing practice and health policy. Part I focuses on foundational normative issues in nursing ethics, including questions about its independence as a field of inquiry among other subfields in bioethics, its methods, and its potential contribution to forming ethical environments for healthcare professionals. Several chapters address questions surrounding the scope, reliability, and limit of nurses’ ethical knowledge and expertise, and the moral and practical identities that nurses take on qua nurses. Part II focuses on emerging issues in clinical practice and nursing education, including current and anticipated ethical challenges in the care of persons, families, and communities impacted by both physical and mental health conditions are addressed. Several chapters aim to proactively identify ethical concerns posed by new developments in areas such as biotechnology, health policy, and cultural shifts.

Together, the essays in this volume provide focused, in-depth normative inquiry and analysis on central and new topics in nursing ethics, moving beyond what is typically found in a broad, comprehensive introductory text, filling a significant gap in the nursing ethics literature. These essays reinforce the field as a distinct and important subfield of both academic bioethics and clinical ethics.

Michael J. Deem is Associate Professor in the Department of Human Genetics and Core Faculty in the Center for Bioethics & Health Law at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also Director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Consortium Ethics Program, which provides continuing ethics education to healthcare professionals. He has published widely in philosophy and bioethics, and has taught ethics courses in genetic counselling, medicine, nursing, philosophy, and rehabilitation science programs for over a decade.

Jennifer H. Lingler is Professor of Nursing and Psychiatry, and faculty at the Center for Bioethics & Health Law, at the University of Pittsburgh. Her federally and foundation funded research focuses on psychosocial and ethical issues in dementia care and research, with an emphasis on provider-patient communication.