Abstract The issue of medical ethics, from thorny moral questions such as euthanasia and the morality of killing to political questions such as the fair distribution of health care resources, is rarely out of today's media. This area of ethics covers a wide range of issues, from mental health to reproductive medicine, as well as including management issues such as resource allocation, and has proven to hold enduring interest for the general public as well as medical practitioners. This Very Short Introduction provides an invaluable tool with which to think about the ethical values that lie at the heart of medicine. This new edition explores the ethical reasoning we can use to approach medical ethics, introducing the most important tools of ethical reasoning, and discussing how argument, thought experiments, and intuition can be combined in the consideration of medical ethics.