The focus of this chapter is an overview of ethics and the relationship of ethics to the practice of palliative care. While other chapters will look at specific topics in detail, with a focus on palliative care (broadly construed), this chapter will look at the role of ethics and explore the nature of the terms “ethics” and “bioethics,” before exploring the ethics in palliative care from two perspectives: the first, more traditional approach, looking at (“top-down”) moral theories, including consequentialism, deontology, and virtue theory; and the second adopting an inductive (“bottom-up”) viewpoint, from the patient’s bedside.