ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces bioethics as a practice and an area of ethics of interest to several disciplines. It identifies the historical roots of contemporary bioethics in the development of Western medicine and its professional ethics. The chapter considers descriptive and normative senses of morality. It distinguishes philosophical studies of morality from those of the sciences. The chapter includes the bioethics in the landscape of ethics. The patient's right to refuse medical treatment, including vaccination, was generally ignored until the rise of contemporary bioethics in the 1960s and 1970s. Ethics or moral philosophy provides bioethics with a set of lenses through which to look analytically at the moral issues arising in the practice of medicine. The issues and arguments of bioethics have roots of two kinds: some have emerged in the history of medicine, others as a result of contemporary reflection about moral right and wrong in the practice of medicine.
