Caring for good people is difficult enough; to care for people who are either aggressive or violent is even more difficult. This is what psychiatric nurses working in the psychiatric institution in which research was done are exposed to on a daily basis. The aim of the research was to explore and describe the lived experience by psychiatric nurses of aggression and violence from patients in a Gauteng psychiatric institution. A qualitative, explorative, descriptive, and contextual study design was utilised. Data was collected by means of semi-structured interviews and naïve sketches. Tesch’s (Creswell, 2004:256) method of open coding and an independent coder were utilised for data analysis. This study shed some light on the lived experience by psychiatric nurses of aggression and violence from patients in a Gauteng psychiatric institution. The findings show that the level of violence and aggression to which psychiatric nurses are exposed is overwhelming and the consequences are alarming. The contributing factors to this violence and aggression are: the mental status and the conditions in which patients are admitted; the staff shortage; the lack of support among the members of the multidisciplinary team (MDT); and the lack of structured and comprehensive orientation among newly appointed staff members. As a result, psychiatric nurses are emotionally, psychologically, and physically affected. They then respond with the following emotions and behaviour: fear, anger, frustration, despair, hopelessness and helplessness, substance abuse, absenteeism, retaliation and the development of an “I don’t care” attitude.

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In this article, I deal with the issue of a possible ethics of responsibility (ER) from a philosophical perspective in general, and bioethics in particular. My aim is to explore whether an ER is able to incorporate or integrate some, if not most, of the valid (and valuable) aspects of utilitarianism and deontology, without succumbing to most of the glaring shortcomings of these two famous frameworks. If such an enterprise could be successful, I would venture to infer that the ER could indeed be highly relevant for the time in which we live. I develop three central ideas of the framework of the ethics of responsibility. These three ideas are, firstly, that an appropriate framework for moral decision-making requires us to make room for the possibility of failure; secondly, we must see the implications of Jonas’ emphasis on the need for an ethics of futurity for taking cognisance of the consequences of acts, and, thirdly, that although consequences of actions may be important, as utilitarianism has always insisted, consequences are not enough. Moral actions are also of necessity guided by rules and principles when making moral decisions. It is particularly in this respect that I shall, at the end, draw on the insights of Aristotle in respect of his notion of phronesis. The crux of my argument is to be found in what Aristotle identifies as the essence of moral knowledge. Moral knowledge respects and often builds upon the norms and action guides that pervade social life. However, merely drawing on deep-seated norms and conventions is not enough. These norms and conventions require application in a host of practical situations. Exactly how they are to be applied, is far from self-evident. That is something that we learn in the practice of daily life by the deliberation that essentially characterises phronesis or prudence (practical wisdom).

This study investigated whether an intervention program, which was developed within the psycho-educational