Doctor of Philosophy in Nursing Ethics

Nurses are on the front lines of ethical issues in health care. They typically spend the most time with patients and are most familiar with cases involving ethical challenges. Yet, nurses are often constrained by institutional policy and limited decision-making authority when ethically charged situations arise.

The Duquesne University online PhD program in Nursing Ethics provides nurses with expertise in evaluating and responding to ethically challenging situations in clinical practice and healthcare policy. In this program, students learn how to think and debate about ethics in a rigorous and rational manner. With intellectual skills and practical ethics knowledge, graduates will be prepared and empowered to stand up for what they know is right.

Program Focus

The PhD program in Nursing Ethics is an interdisciplinary program offered in collaboration with the Center for Global Health Ethics in the McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts.

The Nursing Ethics PhD is distinguished from the traditional PhD in important ways. The PhD in Nursing program prepares scientists to engage in empirical research, while the PhD in Nursing Ethics program trains ethicists to engage in normative scholarship. Normative research or scholarship aims at figuring out what is right, good and what should or ought to be the case, whereas empirical inquiry aims at figuring out what is the case. Normative research is the hallmark of the field of ethics. In this program, students learn normative methods, and apply those methods to challenging ethical problems in nursing practice and healthcare policy.

The program also offers students the opportunity to conduct empirical research with our highly accomplished nurse scientists However, the focus of the program, including the dissertation, is normative in nature: students learn to make reasoned arguments for their positions on a range of challenging and controversial moral problems in nursing and healthcare, and to respond rationally and convincingly to those who hold different positions. In this way, students will be prepared to contribute to the ethical improvement of nursing practice and the delivery of healthcare.

For a more detailed description of normative scholarship and its distinction from empirical research, as well as a discussion of the importance of normative scholarship in nursing, please see Vogelstein & Colbert (2019).

PhD in Nursing Ethics Roundtable Videos