Bioethics is an interdisciplinary field of study dealing with practical ethical issues roughly at the intersection of morality, medicine, and the life sciences. Within philosophy, bioethics is one of several different areas of applied ethics, a domain within general normative ethics. The term "bioethics" was coined in 1970, but the development of bioethics as a discipline may be dated to the late 1960s or early 1970s, depending on which historical markers are used.

The scope of bioethics as a discipline is not entirely fixed, it is important to note. At least three competing visions are available. On the most restricted view, bioethics simply reduces to biomedical ethics, which encompasses ethical issues relating to the practice of medicine broadly understood and the pursuit of medical research. Even on this restricted view of bioethics, the scope extends to the ethics of our use of nonhuman animals in biomedical research, for example...