Exploring Ethical Implications for Acting Faithfully in Professional Relationships

The obligation to act faithfully poses ethical issues as nurses live nursing from day to day. In this column, the ethics of acting faithfully is explored in relation to four scenarios drawn from different realms of professional nursing. The scenarios illustrate ethical issues that may arise when attempting to uphold personal integrity and fulfill one’s duty to act faithfully. The theoretical context of this discussion is the human becoming school of thought. In an earlier paper in this column, Milton (2002) discussed the notion of acting faithfully, arguing that this term is more congruent with nursing than the bioethical principle of fidel-ity. As she asserted there, the ethics of acting faithfully needs to be “explored and articulated through the language and sci-ence of the discipline of nursing ” (p. 22). In this paper, I will expand upon the notion of acting faithfully in relation to per-sonal integrity. In particular, I will present four scenarios drawn from different realms of professional nursing in order to illustrate ethical issues that may arise when attempting to uphold personal integrity and fulfill one’s duty to act faith