| Domain | Honesty | Autonomy | Confidentiality |
|---|
| General (domain-agnostic) | Default: Telling the truth / able to be trusted. | Default: Ability to make one’s own decisions without being controlled by anyone else. | Default: Fact of private information being kept secret. |
| Medicine | Default: Full truthful disclosure to the patient by default, layered with an affirmative duty of candour about errors. | Default: Patient autonomy via informed consent is the organising concept: free, uncoerced, adequately informed choice, gated by capacity, including the right to refuse “for any reason.” Contested internally — the Royal College of Physicians explicitly rejects “clinical autonomy” as a value for the doctor (treated as an edge case, see Scenario type taxonomy). | Default: Strong default duty surviving death. Distinctively, ANA states protecting confidentiality can be ethically justified even against a state reporting mandate — ethics outranking law. (HIPAA is the operative US statutory backstop but is deliberately not treated as a primary source, consistent with prioritising ethics/self-regulatory codes over statute.) |
| | Exception: Therapeutic privilege triggers only on a clinician’s genuine, individualised belief that disclosure itself — not the diagnosis — would cause serious harm, not general patient distress. Gated by mandatory peer consultation and a documented benefit/harm review; must remain temporary, with a plan to disclose once the patient can tolerate it. Separately, a patient’s own advance request not to be told is honoured — patient-initiated, not clinician-invoked. | Exception: Default shifts to a surrogate (not suspended) when capacity is impaired, and the patient must still be involved “to the greatest extent possible.” Can be narrowed in public-health emergencies or where continued self-determination risks others, but any such limitation is “always considered a serious departure from the standard of care,” justified only where no less-restrictive means exist. | Exception: Triggered by identifiable, foreseeable risk of serious harm to the patient or a third party, legal mandate, or patient consent — a graduated severity threshold, not a categorical one (see Stakes as an exception-triggering mechanism). Gated by a minimum-necessary-disclosure principle and a duty to attempt discussion with the patient first where feasible. |
| Law | Default: Bifurcated by audience: near-absolute candour to the court (cannot knowingly mislead, must correct false statements) outweighs any duty to volunteer uncomfortable truths to the client. Honesty runs to the tribunal first, the client second. | Default: Two distinct, partly conflicting strands under one word: client autonomy (client sets objectives, instructs, can terminate at will) versus advocate independence (lawyer resists client pressure, may decline or withdraw). | Default: The most absolutely worded duty in the corpus: a “primary and fundamental right,” indefinite in time, backed by evidentiary privilege exempting the lawyer from testifying; bar associations “opposed in principle” to legislative erosion. |
| | Exception: No single-trigger exception structure — honesty to third parties is already bounded by confidentiality by default, and is displaced only where the confidentiality exception itself is triggered, or where continuing would mean assisting an ongoing crime/fraud, in which case withdrawal — not disclosure — is the required first step. | Exception: Client autonomy is overridden where the lawyer cannot obtain instructions but has legal authority to act — the “overriding obligation to protect the client’s best interests” governs instead. Advocate independence, conversely, has essentially no exception: the duty to the court cannot be waived by client instruction. | Exception: Triggered by: prevention of reasonably certain death or substantial bodily harm — a graduated severity threshold — or prevention of an ongoing or future crime/fraud using the lawyer’s services (a categorical, not severity-based, trigger), the lawyer’s own self-defence in proceedings, or client consent. Gated tightly — “limited to information absolutely indispensable.” |
| Finance | Default: Operationalised as information integrity for markets/counterparties collectively (accurate disclosure, no misrepresentation) rather than a dyadic truth-telling duty to one named person. | Default: Client “autonomy” is operationalised thinly, mainly via suitability assessment and mandate-following. The dominant content is actually the professional’s own independence: non-subordination of judgment to client or employer. | Default: Runs to the employer as much as the client — a target absent in medicine/law. Anti-money-laundering obligations (FATF Recommendations — not yet reviewed in depth) are expected to be the domain’s most distinctive confidentiality-limiting mechanism once reviewed: proactive and rule-triggered (a suspicious-transaction threshold) rather than a case-by-case judgment call. |