The purpose of this paper is to explore how different insights from a variety of theories might help ethical decision making in educational counselling and highlight the need for reflection. A framework for ethical decision making based on basic features of counselling, namely the interlocutors' practice or "acts", is proposed. There are three aspects of the acts that need to be addressed: intentions, social interactions and consequences. We argue that all these aspects should be subject to ethical evaluation and that they inevitably actualize certain ethical theories, exemplified by fragments of, respectively, ethics of duty/ethics of mind, ethics of interaction/communication and ethics of consequences. Theoretical and practical implications are also discussed.