Cultivating moral perception and shaping moral intuitions in nursing students

Abstract

Ethics education has emphasized abstract principles and the centrality of prospective reasoning without adequately addressing the embodied, emotional dimensions of moral decision-making or moral psychology’s changing understanding of how moral decisions are made. These limitations may leave nurses less prepared for the ethical complexity and moral pain involved in clinical practice. This article describes a “Moral Phenomenology” assignment meant to address these inadequacies by integrating insights from Merleau-Pontian phenomenology in ethics education. The assignment guides students through offering a deep description of an ethical dilemma they have faced, applying phenomenological concepts to deepen their understanding of moral perception, and finally, analyzing the dilemma using classical ethical tools and Lisa Tessman’s concept of moral failure. By engaging in sustained phenomenological and ethical reflection on personal dilemmas, students undergo ethical formation rather than mere information acquisition, developing into practitioners whose moral intuitions, perceptual sensitivities, and reflective capacities enable them to navigate moral distress with courage and perceive ethical dimensions of care that might otherwise remain invisible.