Teaching ethics: telling stories.

In order to develop moral literacy, nursing students should be exposed both to traditional rules and justice-based ethics, and to a feminist care perspective. Justice and truth are not objective and abstract, but are embedded in context and are relative in nature. Nurses may be given the tools with which to analyse and understand ethical dilemmas from a justice-based view and an opportunity to tell their stories in order to understand the roles, motives, relational considerations and contextual influences on decision outcomes. If we are serious about our desire to raise critical consciousness of students and nurses in practice, we must attend to and join feminists in their attempts to validate women's ways of knowing, to assist women to question their contexts, and to put aside preconceived positions and notions about moral reasoning among women.