Second, I am not arguing for scepticism about the role
of virtue ethics in certain specific debates in medical
ethics and bioethics. For example, there is an important
debate in the emerging field of public health
ethics about how far the state ought to go in coercing
people to change their health behaviours (Holland,
2007). The debate centres on competing conceptions
of the good, or what is the good life for a human
being, so virtue ethics is clearly relevant. But these lie
outside the field of nursing ethics