Applied ethics

« Applied ethics Applied ethics is marked out from ethics in general by its special focus on issues of practical concern.

It therefore includes medical ethics, environmental ethics, and evaluation of the social implications of scientific and technological change, as well as matters of policy in such areas as health care, business or journalism.

It is also concerned with professional codes and responsibilities in such areas.

Typical of the issues discussed are abortion, euthanasia, personal relationships, the treatment of nonhuman animals, and matters of race and gender.

Although sometimes treated in isolation, these issues are best discussed in the context of some more general questions which have been perennial preoccupations of philosophers, such as: How should we see the world and our place in it? What is the good life for the individual? What is the good society? In relation to these questions, applied ethics involves discussion of fundamental ethical theory, including utilitarianism, liberal rights theory and virtue ethics.

‘Applied ethics' and ‘applied philosophy' are sometimes used as synonyms, but applied philosophy is in fact broader, covering also such fields as law, education and art, and theoretical issues in artificial intelligence.

These areas include philosophical problems - metaphysical and epistemological - that are not strictly ethical.

Applied ethics may therefore be understood as focusing more closely on ethical questions.

Nevertheless, many of the issues it treats do in fact involve other aspects of philosophy, medical ethics, for example, including such metaphysical themes as the nature of 'personhood', or the definition of death.

1 Definitions While the name ‘applied ethics' is comparatively new, the idea is not.

Philosophy has traditionally concerned itself with questions both of personal morality (what should I do?) and public morality (what is the good society?), but while these questions are fundamental to applied ethics, they could also be said to characterize ethics in general.

Applied ethics is therefore distinguished commonly as that part of ethics that gives particular and direct attention to practical issues and controversies.

In the private sphere, ethical issues include, for example, matters relating to the family (see Family, ethics and the), or to close personal relationships (see Friendship), the care of the old or disabled, the raising of the young, particularly where matters of morality are concerned, or personal ethical problems arising for the individual in the work-place.

In the public sphere, applied ethics may involve assessing policy in the light of the impact of advances in biomedical technology (see Life and death; Risk; Technology and ethics), or assessing international obligations and duties to future generations in the light of environmental problems (see Future generations, obligations to; Population and ethics).

The public arena includes, too, a range of issues for the plural society, such as ethnicity or gender in relation to discrimination, cultural understanding and toleration; more widely still, it may extend to issues of interest also to political philosophy, such as terrorism and the ethics of war.

In all these matters, the concern of applied ethics is not only to supply a personal ethical perspective, but also to provide guidelines for public policy.

Applied ethics includes, as well, the area of professional ethics; it examines the ethical dilemmas and challenges met with by workers in the health care field - doctors, nurses, counsellors, psychiatrists, dentists - and by a wide range of workers in other professions including lawyers, accountants, managers and administrators, people in business, police and law enforcement officers.

Specific ethical issues such as confidentiality, truth-telling, or conflicts of interest may arise in all or any of these areas, and most professions seek to codify their approaches and provide guidance for their members.

2 Theory and practice Underlying all such issues are questions about justice, rights, utility, virtue and community.

The practice of distinguishing between theoretical and applied ethics must, therefore, be treated with some caution.

Indeed, some have regarded the term ‘applied' as redundant, on the grounds that there cannot be an ‘ethics' which is not applied: on the one hand, they argue, theoretical concepts such as rights and justice should not be viewed as mere abstractions; and, on the other, applied ethics should not be detached from its roots in traditional morality.

But while it is important to stress this continuity, there are certain characteristic features of applied ethics which mark Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Version 1.0, London and New York: Routledge (1998) Applied ethics it out in practice from theoretical ethics.

These are (a) its greater attention to context and detail and (b) its more holistic approach - its willingness to link ethical ideals to a conception of human nature and human needs (see Human nature; Needs and interests). Thus practitioners of applied ethics may be more willing than proponents of traditional academic moral philosophy to recognize that psychology and sociology, a knowledge of culture and history, the insights of good literature, and even an understanding of humans as biological entities, are all relevant to the determination of moral issues in personal and public life.

The demarcation line between applied and theoretical ethics which this suggests may be drawn at that point on the spectrum of ethics where ethical theory stops short of normative recommendations and confines itself to the analysis of moral concepts such as ‘right', ‘good', ‘responsibility', ‘blame' and ‘virtue' and to discussion of what might be called the epistemology of ethics - such theories as ethical realism, subjectivism and relativism (see Analytic ethics; Moral knowledge; Moral realism; Logic of ethical discourse).

This is the area sometimes described as ‘meta-ethics'.

Drawing the line at this point may be useful so long as it is not allowed to obscure the truth that applied and theoretical ethics are not discrete but lie on a continuum from the particular to the general, the concrete to the abstract.

The ultimate focus of applied ethics may well be entirely particular: the individual case-study.

And it is this that gives rise to a further characteristic feature of applied ethics: its concern with dilemmas - not necessarily in the hard logical sense of situations in which it is impossible to act rightly because each of two opposite courses of action is either judged to be mandatory or judged to be wrong; but in the looser sense of cases in which a choice between courses of action may be extremely difficult, the arguments on both sides being compelling, and the person who must act being strongly influenced in opposing directions (for example, to sanction drastic medical intervention to save a severely disabled baby which would otherwise die, or to allow nature to take its course).

It should be said, though, that choosing between options which are not morally equal is not, strictly speaking, a dilemma, although it is admittedly likely to be emotionally traumatizing, while choosing between moral obligations that are indisputably of equal weight is not a moral problem.

The question for applied ethics in such cases may well be whether or not the available options are indeed morally equal.

Because it focuses on individual dilemmas, applied ethics must confront the question of universalization, which may also be seen as a ‘free rider' problem: many things are judged to be wrong as a result of asking the question, ‘What if everyone did that?', even though, in a particular case, it might seem harmless and more convenient for an individual to ignore the. »