Ethics can be considered from a variety of theories or understandings. For the purposes of this chapter we will consider ethics from the viewpoint of the individual teacher, in addition to the professional expectations of teachers to behave in a right and proper manner that are externally imposed. This dual perspective will be used when considering actions and decision making undertaken with fellow teachers, school administration or leaders in a teacher’s school, and most importantly, when interacting with students entrusted into a teacher’s care or with their parents/caregivers.

What is ethics and, in any case, why worry about it? What has ethics got to do with law, anyway? Surely, if an activity or decision is legal, who cares if it is ethical or not? And why do I have to learn about morals and ethics before I know much law? These questions might seem to have obvious answers — and you may think that they all lead in the one direction: that ethics are not important. But you would be wrong. Many lawyers have found this out too late and paid a price.

Current medical ethics and bioethics, as well as neurosurgical ethics in particular, are derived from a number of historical sources. Early medical ethics became increasingly deontological, and transformed into bioethics with increasing societal impact with scientific interventions. Neurosurgeons have been involved in ethical issues since the inception of the field.

As a nurse, you will be called upon to support, care for and protect people who are vastly different from yourself. How you respond to the diversity of human beings will be a measure of your own humanity as well as your professionalism. Certainly, caring does not come as easily to some nurses as it does to others. So why do people want to support the ill or incapacitated? What is it about human nature that causes people to care for each other at all?This chapter will provide a response to this question through a description of the human person as a dynamic unity of personal factors (such as biology and psychology); interpersonal factors (such as relationships with immediate family and close friends); and social factors (such as type of education, or socioeconomic status). The concept of vulnerability will be discussed, where you will see that it is vulnerability that gives us the capacity to care for each other.