The continuing rapid expansion of the technoculture which is happening in today's American health care system, is a threat to human relationships. Accelerating health care costs, an aging population, homelessness, HIV/AIDS and other evolving disease phenomena, as well as substance abuse and associated catastrophic problems, are a sampling of the factors contributing to the debilitation of human relations. However, through nurses as caring practitioners, this threat to denigrate human connection can be diminished.

In a paternalistic society, despite recent significant improvements for women, there is a residual perception that caring is primarily a feminine trait of secondary importance. While the nursing profession is predominantly female and is socioculturally perceived as feminine, male nurses are represented in every nursing specialty, often in leadership roles. If both men and women practice nursing according to the required level of high moral reasoning, do men and women employ similar reasoning patterns when forming ethical decisions?.

Previously, researchers explaining moral behavior in nurses have focused on Kohlberg's justice-oriented theory of moral development, yielding unsatisfactory results. Gilligan et al., as well as nurse scholars, have challenged the widely accepted views by Kohlberg and argue for an opposing orientation to moral reasoning identified as a care perspective.

In order to answer the question whether or not the moral reasoning perspectives chosen by nurses are gender specific or gender related, a convenience sample of five male and five female nurses responded to four practice-related moral dilemmas. The interviews were transcribed and the content analyzed to determine the choice of moral perspective, guided by a procedure developed by Lyons and modified for this qualitative study. Constructs of justice and care were validated by the researcher analyzing the literature and were used to develop a reading guide for moral perspective.

The researcher found that the choice of moral framework along gender lines was not apparent. The major finding is that male and female nurses know and represent both moral perspectives of care and justice in their attempts to resolve moral conflict.