In general, however, the analyst need not adopt any of the three roles in its extreme form. Rather than selecting one of the three fundamental values as dominant and sacrificing the other two as circumstances demand, the analyst should attempt to keep all three under consideration. The ethical problem, then, involves deciding how much of each value can be sacrificed when conflicts arise.
In any situation, the range of ethical behavior will be bounded by the minimal duties the analyst owes to each of the values. The development of professional ethics, either collectively or individually, may be viewed as an attempt to discover these minimal duties. In the discussion that follows, we consider some of the common situations in which value conflicts arise and minimal duties must be determined. We begin by considering the range of actions the analyst has available for responding to severe conflicts in value