CARING AND JUSTICE - A STUDY OF 2 APPROACHES TO HEALTH-CARE ETHICS

This article presents an empirical study of approaches tr, ethical dec ision-making among nurses and doctors. It takes as its starting paint the distinction between the perspectives of care and of justice in eth ical thinking, and the view that nurses' thinking will be aligned with the former and doctors' with the latter. It goes on to argue that the differences in these approaches are best understood in terms of the d istinction between partialist and impartialist modes of moral thinking . The study seeks to determine the distribution of these modes of thin king between nurses and doctors, and finds that there are no significa nt differences between them. A 'two-level' philosophical view of the n ature of moral thinking is appealed to in order to explain the study f indings.