Resolving ethical dilemmas about privacy and confidentiality. Guidelines for decision making

Ethical dilemmas are, by the very fact of being dilemmas, situations in which the right action is not immediately evident. A significant number of the ethical dilemmas faced by health-care and other professionals include respect for privacy or confidentiality as one of the values involved. To say that a situation represents an ethical dilemma is not to say that it is unresolvable; nor is it to say that any single resolution is as good as another. Rather, ethical dilemmas can be resolved adequately and consistently by applying a clear framework of analysis and guidelines for decision making. In this article, I describe ways of thinking about privacy and confidentiality that make ethical concerns related to these values more manageable. Despite the pluralistic nature of our society, the systematic study of contemporary ethical issues has led to some widely supported approaches for resolving ethical dilemmas. Although it would be exaggerating to claim full consensus among ethicists on what follows in this article, it is not exaggerating to say that the perspective represents a common approach to understanding privacy and confidentiality obligations and that many find these guidelines helpful in addressing specific situations.