Ethics education is an essential component of nursing education, yet ethical competence cannot be assumed to be fully developed at the point of graduation. This commentary builds upon Papastavrou et al. (2026) by examining the need for continuing ethical reflection after formal nursing education has ended. A distinction is made between ethical knowledge acquired through education and the ability to recognise, analyse, and respond to ethically challenging situations in clinical practice. Existing literature suggests that healthcare professionals encounter ethical challenges in everyday practice and that structured ethics reflection can support ethical awareness, professional development, and ethical decision making. The commentary argues that ethical competence should be understood as a dynamic capacity that requires continued development throughout professional practice, particularly when nurses encounter changing clinical contexts and competing ethical responsibilities. Structured approaches, including ethics rounds, may provide opportunities to practise ethical reasoning and to examine ethical problems beyond informal collegial consensus. Their interprofessional character may further facilitate the consideration of different professional perspectives and responsibilities. However, stronger empirical evidence is needed to establish the effectiveness of such approaches. Healthcare organisations should therefore consider whether they have a responsibility to provide the time, structures, and supportive environments necessary for nurses to develop and maintain ethical competence throughout their professional careers.
An important question that vocational educators face is, namely, ‘How do we make people want to do good in professional life?’. This paper explores the concept of professionalism as an approach to ethics education – both in vocational degree programs and also in professional associations and colleges. I argue that current approaches to professionalism focused on guidelines or standards for good professional practice fall short of fostering intrinsic motivation among professionals to pursue the good in their work. I discuss how a framework of professionalism grounded in a robust sense of professional identity and virtue can fill the motivational gap that currently exists in some professionalism frameworks. I then explore how professionalism curriculums might go about fostering professional identity and virtue among students and junior professionals. The paper closes with a discussion of the advantages of integrating a robust professional identity and virtue framework into ethics education.
Contemporary education increasingly emphasizes competency-based approaches oriented toward measurable outcomes, employability, accountability, and performance. While these approaches have strengthened educational planning and skills development, growing scholarly debate questions whether competence alone provides an adequate account of broader educational purposes. Recent discussions on human flourishing have renewed attention to education’s role in supporting ethical development, meaningful participation, and the formation of persons capable of living well within diverse social contexts. This article examines the relationship between human flourishing and moral education and explores how character formation may be repositioned within contemporary curriculum discourse. Drawing on conceptual analysis and interpretive synthesis of philosophical, curriculum, and moral education scholarship, the article critically examines both the contributions and limitations of competency-oriented models and considers contemporary debates concerning flourishing as an educational aim. Rather than presenting competence and flourishing as competing priorities, the article proposes a curriculum framework that integrates intellectual development, ethical formation, practical judgment, and social responsibility. The article concludes by discussing implications for curriculum design, pedagogy, and educational policy and argues for a broader understanding of educational success that incorporates both competence and human flourishing.
