Oral health care professionals are becoming increasingly aware that almost every clinical consultation raises scientific, ethical and legal challenges. While scientific challenges may be resolved using an evidence-based medicine (EBM) approach, moral complexity must be resolved using ethical theory to justify decision making in the face of ethical conflict. Ethics and the dental team, the first title of its kind in South Africa, provides the theoretical background necessary for the resolution of ethical dilemmas. Ethics and the dental team uses case studies to demonstrate how to identify, analyse and apply ethical, moral and value concepts to scenarios that are encountered on a daily basis.