Posthuman Ethics in Nursing Practice

Posthuman ethics in nursing practice marks a paradigmatic shift from human-centred moral frameworks towards an approach that recognises the agency and interdependence of humans, technologies, environments and other non-human entities. It examines how advanced medical devices, artificial intelligence, biotechnologies and ecological systems co-constitute care and ethical responsibility. This perspective challenges traditional notions of autonomy and consent by emphasising relationality, distributed accountability and shared vulnerability across human and more-than-human assemblages. In practical terms, posthuman ethics invites nurses to attend not only to patient bodies and psychosocial contexts but also to the materiality of instruments, the design of hospital spaces, data flows and ecosystem health. Globally, it offers a lens for addressing challenges such as technological inequity, planetary health and socio-environmental justice. By integrating critical philosophies with concrete examples—ranging from AI-supported wound management to multispecies community care—posthuman ethics broadens nursing’s remit, fostering practices that are attuned to complex webs of life and driven by solidarity rather than human exceptionalism.

Research from Nature Portfolio

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Research from all publishers

Recent analyses have clarified how critical posthumanism can enrich nursing’s engagement with planetary health. One study describes critical posthumanism as a “double-edged sword”: it decentr es the human in favour of ecological interconnections yet requires clearer terminology and accessible frameworks. By aligning key nursing ways of knowing with examples such as community gardening projects and hospital waste audits, the research demonstrates how nurses can leverage posthuman insights to address climate-related health risks. Another investigation into posthuman nursing thought offers a genealogy of posthumanisms—tracing transhumanist, feminist new materialist and speculative ethics currents—and shows how elements of each are already present in nursing education, technological use and collaborative care. This work concludes with speculative worldbuilding exercises, inviting nurses to imagine futures where bodies, machines and environments co-author care. A further ethnographic inquiry advocates for “entangled ethnography” in nursing research, foregrounding the inseparability of bodies, objects and meaning-making practices. Through arts-based data, it reveals how acknowledging material-semiotic entanglements can yield more inclusive methodologies, particularly when working with marginalised groups experiencing disembodiment.

Posthuman Ethics in Nursing Practice publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in posthuman ethics in nursing practice across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Posthumanism: A philosophical orientation that critiques human exceptionalism by emphasising relational networks of humans, technologies, animals and environments.

Critical posthumanism: A strand of posthumanism focused on power, social justice and decentring anthropocentric ethics to address ecological and technological inequities.

Entanglement: The concept that bodies, objects, ideas and contexts are dynamically interwoven and mutually constitutive in practices of care and research.

Feminist new materialism: An approach highlighting the agency of matter and the co-production of social and material worlds, informed by feminist critiques of power.

Speculative ethics: A mode of ethical inquiry that explores emergent possibilities, future scenarios and novel forms of moral agency beyond current norms.

References

1. Critical posthumanism: A double‐edged sword for advancing nursing knowledge in planetary health. Nursing Inquiry (2024).
2. Notes on [post]human nursing: What It MIGHT Be, What it is Not. Nursing Inquiry (2023).
3. Critical ethnography and its others: Entanglement of matter/meaning/madness. Nursing Inquiry (2023).