The Politicization of Ethical Knowledge: Feminist Ethics as a Basis for Home Care Nursing Research

Abstract

Increasingly, health-care services are provided within the home. This change has resulted in the emergence of new, largely unexplored ethical concerns for nurses. The current state of ethical knowledge in nursing, however, is not adequate to address these issues. The author describes the development of a new research method to develop this knowledge. First, she examines phenomenological approaches in nursing ethics, which are important because they have rigorously used a philosophical perspective to inform both theoretical and empirical enquiry in nursing ethics. Nevertheless, the author argues that phenomenology is not adequately sensitive to the impact of political constraints upon the moral agency of nurses. Second, she describes the benefits of using feminist ethics as a conceptual basis for nursing ethics inquiry. Third, she describes the development of an alternative method and demonstrates how it can be applied to home care ethics research.