Confucian Ethics, Public Policy, and the Nurse-Family Partnership

The Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP), a thirty-year program of research in the United States focused on early childhood preventive intervention, offers a powerful example of the kinds of programs and public policies that Confucian understandings of parent-child relationships and moral cultivation might recommend in contemporary societies today. NFP findings, as well as its theoretical foundations, lend empirical support to early Confucian views of the role of parent-child relationships in human moral development, the nature and possibility of moral self-cultivation, and the task of creating and sustaining a good society, which gives philosophers who are interested in ethical claims that reflect and inform actual practice good reasons to take Confucian ethics seriously. Additionally, the evidence provided by the NFP and early Confucian accounts can both be used to promote social change, which highlights how the sciences and the humanities can work together in complementary ways to address societal problems.