[Professional responsibility: maximal, minimal, excellence and veracity]

Professional responsibility provides the groundwork for medicine since the existence of the Hippocratic Oath. Physicians must be prepared to justify their decisions and actions, based on scientific issues but also considering the underlying professional responsibilities. Ethical theories form a major part of such justification. A number of competing ethical theories may be identified. The maximal, minimal and excellence ethical theories agree with our experience with moral uncertainties. But veracity ethics is a new form of answering moral questions. Clinical situations are unavoidably conflictive. Lucid understanding of the necessary character of these conflicts leads to self-recognition and the itinerary of veracity ethics runs from misunderstanding to recognition. The self-awareness that veracity offers to physicians is difficult and painful due to the narcissistic humiliation that it inflicts on them.