Teaching is an ethical activity and in order to ensure a high quality in teaching, ethics need to be visualizedand verbalized. In a phenomenological empirical study with student teachers as participants, data wereanalyzed in order to express the essential meanings of professional ethics. The essence can be described asthe meanings that in spite of different contexts are relatively persistent. In phenomenology, the possibilityof expressing the essence of a phenomenon is interpreted in different ways. Inthis article, the author arguesthat the essence is needed to verbalize ethics in teaching tentatively as a kind of ethical code or guidelinefor becoming teachers. Some of the essentialfindingsstemmingfrom the empirical study mentioned abovearecomparedwith the ethical principles formulated inLäraresYrkesetiskaPrinciper(2001) by the two Swedishunions,LärarförbundetandLärarnas Riksförbund,to argue for the importance of formulating the essence.