Nursing in Capitalist Healthcare: The Ethical Dichotomy Between the Vocation of Nursing and the Healthcare‐Industrial Complex

ABSTRACT

Nursing is a profession grounded in a vocation of caring, altruism and moral responsibility. However, contemporary nursing practice occurs largely within a healthcare system structured by neoliberal, productivity‐driven imperatives—commonly described as the healthcare‐industrial complex. As market‐oriented logics continue to shape healthcare delivery and access to care, tensions emerge between the moral foundations of nursing and the economic rationalities that govern healthcare institutions. This paper presents a philosophical analysis of the bioethical contradictions that nurses experience in practising within the healthcare‐industrial complex. Drawing on bioethical principles, nursing ethics and critical social theory, the analysis examines how neoliberal healthcare structures create moral distress, ethical dissonance and constrained moral agency among nurses. This paper argues that nurses' ethical struggle is not a failure of professional integrity but a predictable outcome of structural forces that compel participation in systems that are misaligned with nursing's moral commitments. By elucidating these dynamics, this analysis offers a conceptual framework for understanding nurse moral distress and identifies pathways for ethical agency, resistance and professional advocacy within contemporary healthcare.