During recent years there have been noticeable shortcomings in the human encounter of people seeking some form of health care in Sweden. This is something that affects professional education within ‘the welfare state’ and implies that human expectations, societal demands and questions about knowledge, basic values and competence have become pedagogically interesting. The basic aim of the dissertation is - to contribute to a practically, relevant and theoretical in-depth understanding of the learning and teaching of ethics in professional education. By taking nursing education as an example and focussing on the human encounter of the person seeking care, the dissertation aims - by analysis of the pedagogic practice and from a critical-theoretical perspective – to provide a foundation for such an understanding. The research perspective includes a social-philosophical point of departure with a focus on Mead’s interactional view of learning and Habermas’s critical theory of social communication. Methodologically an emphasis is placed on discourse analysis. The results demonstrate how the learning and teaching of ethics in human encounters can be understood as a question of communication of both knowledge and values. In the theoretical reconstruction that follows it is shown how pedagogic actions, learning and competence can be understood as communication of and in particular contextual discourses. The six discourses are: ‘the efficiency-related discourse’, ‘the expert-related discourse’, the ‘care-related discourse’, ‘the communicative-related discourse’, ‘the egocentric discourse’ and ‘the ethnocentric discourse’, all of which are mutually related to each other. The contextual discourses focus on different values. Those that are most conducive to creating pleasant human encounters are the communicative- and the care-related discourses, which also form the foundation for the pedagogic recommendation that makes up the concluding discussion of the dissertation. The recommendation concerns a pedagogical practice that affirms, pays attention to, safeguards and challenges and thus generates creativity, as well as the legitimacy of pluralism. To engage in stimulating pedagogical discussion means being committed, taking responsibility and practicing solidarity in the profession of education. Such a ‘deliberative pedagogy’ creates possibilities for people to develop solidarity of judgement in a society that increasingly demanding that. In conclusion, the recommendation for a new and challenging human encounter-ethical-pedagogy is intended to show that ‘ideals can be realistic’. Normative recommendations do not have to be abstract visions of the future, but can be looked upon as means of focussing on alternative actions, that despite the difficulties are possible to realise – here and now.