ABSTRACT
When people are trying to decide what the right thing to do is in any given situation, they intuitively appeal to one or more ethical theories to justify their actions. An otherwise truthful person may decide to tell a lie in order to spare a patient’s feelings. Another therapist may decide to disclose confidential patient information to a third party because they believe that they have a right to know. A different practitioner might keep that information secret whatever the consequences, because she has promised not to tell and thinks that people should stick to their promises. In ethical terms, these actions can be analysed as examples of consequence-based, duty-based or virtue-based reasoning. Each of these is a normative theory of ethics which attempts to devise a framework to distinguish right from wrong. Normative ethical theories assume that there is a criterion for knowing right from wrong, whether the criterion is a single rule or a set of rules.
