This article attempts to contribute to the understanding of the particularly important and inescapable role that ethics must play in the context of special needs education. Perspectives from Kierkegaard and Derrida are presented and used in order to explore the complexity of the context and to show the importance and responsibility of the agency of the educator. Such persons must be able to make risk-filled decisions, with no guarantees, regarding the potential "good" of others. Consequently, the individual educator must go beyond ethics itself in order to justify particular courses of action and this inevitably leads to an engagement with the realm of faith. (Contains 1 note.)