ABSTRACT
Bioethics is the study of ethical issues arising out of advances in the life sciences and medicine. New subdisciplines of bioethics such as neuroethics and public health ethics have entered the scene to address the implications of new findings in neuroscience, epidemiology, and social science. To tackle the many challenges in bioethics, those who work in bioethics have fruitfully drawn theoretical resources from other subfields of philosophy, including metaphysics, normative ethics, political philosophy, action theory, moral psychology, and philosophy of mind. Neuroethics is a new subfield of bioethics that examines the moral implications of developments in neuroscience. Bioethics is concerned not only with choices made by patients, families, and physicians that affect the health of only a small number of people at a time but also with policy decisions that affect the distribution of health and health care across populations.
