Gillon's 4 principles of medical ethics

Doctors are often asked to make decisions which have no immediately obvious "right" or "wrong" outcome. Of course, as a doctor, you sign up to do this, and you won't always need help; occasionally though, there are situations that really give one pause for thought, and when a systematic approach is necessary to ensure you have covered all bases.

The most common of these approaches (to my knowledge) is Gillon's 4 principles. The way to use this framework is to work through all of the effects of a decision relating to 4 given principles, and use that as a basis to decide what is the best thing to do. The areas to consider are: beneficence (what good can come of it), non maleficence (what harm could be avoided), autonomy (does it give everyone a choice), and justice (does it do good for the greater community). If it is impossible to decide having done this because all sides of the argument seem to be equal, then more weight is given to autonomy, because there is truly no moral difference between deciding one thing or another, so taking choice away would make any decision unnecessarily immoral.