This brief summary of the issues of biomedical ethics provides a balanced, systematic, unbiased framework designed to help students understand and analyze a wide range of topics that are currently controversial in medicine—or that are likely to arise in the future. Broad in scope, it considers ethical systems from various religious and secular traditions, including those of non-western cultures such as Asian religious and secular traditions. Topics include the history of codes of ethics; the definition of death, abortion, animal rights and welfare; problems in deciding what will benefit patients; confidentiality, truth-telling, informed consent; the care of the terminally ill; genetics, birth technologies; and problems of social ethics, including resource allocation, organ transplant, and human subjects research.