[Diagnosis disclosure: the place of beneficence, autonomy and veracity in medical ethics].
OBJECTIVE
The moral doctrine of diagnosis disclosure is derived from a respect for the patient's autonomy as well as the patient's beneficence. These two goals are not necessarily incompatible, but they often lead to different decisions about what information needs to be shared with patients. The ethics of veracity does not prescribe duties, either old or new, but implies a new way of thinking about ethics.


METHODS
Theories of the three general sorts just mentioned are identified and explained here.


RESULTS
The ethics of veracity as such is limited to unmasking the falsifications of desire that inhabit the moral life. This would meet the moral goals of shared decision-making, because patients could make sense of such data.


CONCLUSIONS
Certainly other moral doctrines may turn out to be relevant to the problems discussed in this paper. Nonetheless, they are sufficiently comprehensive to provide an analytical framework by means of which moral problems of diagnosis disclosure can be evaluated. We cannot expect anything else from the enterprise of the ethics of veracity but a critique of authenticity. Its force is that of suspicion, not justification or legitimation, and still less that of prescription.
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Departamento de Psiquiatría, Universidad de Valparaíso, Chile.
D003933:Diagnosis; D004992:Ethics, Medical; D006801:Humans; D009014:Morals; D010344:Patient Advocacy; D010817:Physician-Patient Relations; D014342:Truth Disclosure