As societies have grown larger and more complex and as human knowledge and technologies have increased, the ethical issues that people face have proliferated. New medical technologies, for example, have brought bioethical questions and raised new concerns about genetic engineering that earlier generations could never have imagined.

An encyclopedic work with more than 1,000 essays covering the full spectrum of ethics issues. Subjects of individual articles include persons, organisations, court cases, concepts, theories, human behavior, business practices, events, laws, political systems, and much more.