Neuroethics is the ethics of neuroscience, or the neuroscience of ethics.

The ethics of neuroscience deals with matters as a subclass of bioethics. Examples include mind control via psychopharmaceuticals, e.g., whether or not to give mind altering drugs to an autistic person to make them more "normal", the ethics of brain surgery such as an anterior commissurotomy to control epilepsy, a consequentialist moral anthropologist considering the consequences of Mayan brain surgery, or a politician considering the ethics of war and using brainwashing techniques in the Korean War, or the ethics of speechwriting to control the mind of a crowd.

The neuroscience of ethics deals with quesions of moral development in the child, as in work of Piaget in the 20th century, or more modern theories of free will that derive from evolutionary theories and molecular biology

The origin of the term "neuroethics" has occupied some writers. Rees and Rose (as cited in "References" on page 9) claim neuroethics is a neologism that emerged only at the beginning of the 21st century, largely through the oral and written communications of ethicists and philosophers. They state that neuroethics addresses concerns about the effects neuroscience and neurotechnology will have on other aspects of human life: namely "personal responsibility", law, and justice. Further, they claim that neuroethical problems will become real by the 2020s.

Adina Roskies (Roskies, 2002) identified two major divisions in neuroethics: the ethics of neuroscience and the neuroscience of ethics. Research falling under the first area, the ethics of neuroscience, is focused on the ethics of practice of neuroscience and "the implications of our mechanistic understanding of brain function for society... integrating neuroscientific knowledge with ethical and social thought". The neuroscience of ethics borrows from the field of neurophilosophy and examines the neurological foundations of moral cognition.