Abstract

Ethics consultants’ grasp of ethical principles is ever improving. Yet, what still remains and will remain lacking is their ability to access factors that lie outside their conscious awareness and thus still effect suboptimal outcomes. This article will explore several ways in which these poor outcomes may occur. This discussion will include clinicians’ implicit biases, well-intentioned but nonetheless intrusive violations of patients’ privacy, and clinicians’ unwittingly connoting to patients and families that clinicians regard their moral values and conclusions as superior. I shall suggest several ways in which clinicians may seek to reduce these sources of bad outcomes or at least to do better when they occur.