Editorial Comment

When discussing nursing ethics we clearly think that professional nursing needs ethics. Ethics is important in nursing, but have we considered the opposite: that ethics can benefit from the experiences of nursing? I shall try to demonstrate that nursing provides experiences fundamental to all ethics. In his famous lectures on ethics (from 1929 or 1930), Ludwig Wittgenstein uses an example to illustrate what ethics is about. If someone says that I play tennis badly, I can reply that I know I do, but that I do not want to play any better.