 There is no standard way of organizing the ethics of clinical practice, public health, and biomedical science. These different fields are often presented as discrete areas of inquiry that fall under the broader, umbrella term of bioethics, but sometimes bioethics is presented as the equivalent of medical ethics or in contrast to public health or population-level bioethics. Whichever approach is preferred, a key question remains: what distinguishes public health ethics from these other fields, and especially from the ethics of clinical care? The answer lies in two characteristics of public health that make it distinctive and that mark morally relevant differences between public health and clinical care- first, public health’s focus on the health of populations and second, the large role that government plays in this pursuit.