An Interview with Joan Tronto on Care Ethics and Nursing Ethics

Abstract

Joan Tronto’s book, Moral Boundaries (1993) established care ethics as a scholarly discipline and led to new initiatives and new ways of thinking especially in political theory, professional ethics, and studying care as practice. Nearly 30 years on, Joan remains committed to an expansive understanding of care and, in this interview, she addresses the synergy between scholarship in care ethics and nursing ethics. First, she recognizes the situation of nurses within healthcare organizations which affords them the opportunity to defend and promote caring as a central form of human practice. She points to some of the key challenges for nurses and nursing ethics from a care ethics perspective: how the larger issues of health care and cost containment affect the ethical possibilities of what nurses can accomplish; the tension between increasingly technical and technologically distant practices and the basic human needs of patients, such as the need to be touched and to be heard; the organizational and political tension between professionalism for nurses and the place of nurses as advocates for everyone else in care settings—especially their role in respecting difference and addressing disparities. Finally, she touches on some of the challenges which the COVID-19 pandemic presents and suggests that, even though it is a huge crisis in health care, it also presents nurses with the opportunity to reorient social values toward all forms of care.