Philosophy comprises a variety of subdisciplines. Ethics, or moral philosophy, has traditionally been considered one of the main philosophical subdisciplines. In turn, the definition of applied ethics is a branch of ethics; it can also be called practical ethics and looks at real-world ethical problems in the hopes of resolving them using philosophical methods. Such problems arise not only in academic settings but in many areas of public or private life. Accordingly, applied ethicists are not just scholars; they can also be medical professionals, business people, or scientists, among others.
Applied ethics stands in contrast to two other branches of ethics: metaethics and normative ethics. Metaethics takes up nonmoral questions about morality itself. For instance:
- What do moral terms like good and right mean?
- Is morality objectively real? Do objective moral facts exist, independent of any perspective?
- Are moral judgments beliefs? Beliefs can be true or false; can moral judgments be true or false?
- If there is such a thing as moral truth, how can we obtain knowledge of it?
- How are we motivated to behave morally?
The central mission of normative ethics is to determine one or more criteria of rightness. Normative ethics pursues moral theories supplying principles or decision procedures to guide action and develop character. Philosophers often divide normative ethics broadly by theory type:
- Consequentialist theories: These emphasize outcomes. Most such theories evaluate the states of affairs that might result from actions or rules and rank those states of affairs impersonally—i.e., without regard to the agent(s) that might perform the actions or act in accordance with the rules in question. Consequentialist theories tend to declare the right action to be the one that produces the best state of affairs or any state of affairs that rises to some satisfactory level of goodness. Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) were important early consequentialists.
- Deontological theories: These insist that the rightness of an action does not need to depend solely on the consequences of that act. The act may have morally relevant qualities, as may the agent set to perform the act. For example, killing an innocent person, even to save the lives of three other innocent people, might be thought wrong regardless of the seemingly better overall state of affairs that will result should the one innocent person be killed and the three other innocent people saved. Deontological theories are often described as duty-based. Their emphasis on actions humans are obligated to perform or refrain from performing is based strictly on the nature of those actions and not on the results those actions might precipitate. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is famously associated with deontology.
- Virtue theories: These focus less on determining the rightness of actions and more on cultivating good character traits or virtues. This does not mean virtue theories are unconcerned with the right behavior, only that they rely on virtues and their opposites, vices, to explain right behavior. For virtue theorists, character traits are fundamental and the basis for understanding the right behavior. Virtues come in different types, such as intellectual virtues and moral virtues, which include such traits as benevolence, courage, generosity, justice, honesty, and loyalty. The great Greek thinker Aristotle is the most well-known of the virtue theorists.
Not all philosophers divide ethics into three branches. Ethics might instead be divided into two branches: metaethics and normative ethics. Each of those might then be further subdivided. In such a mapping, applied ethics will likely fall under normative ethics. Normative ethics and applied ethics focus on the question "What is moral?" while metaethics focuses on the question "What is morality itself?" Ethics can be mapped out in multiple ways, highlighting the interconnectedness of the different branches. Metaethics is important to normative ethics, normative ethics is important to applied ethics, and the concrete problems of applied ethics are sources for the intuitions philosophers use to inform their metaethical and normative-ethical theorizing. While it's possible to insert rough distinctions between the three branches, it's impossible to cleanly separate them so that one branch never draws on the others. The same is true of much of philosophy in general. For example, answering the metaethical question "Is morality objectively real?" requires drawing on the subdiscipline of philosophy known as metaphysics.
History of Applied Ethics
The history of applied ethics stretches back to ancient times. Philosophers have always been concerned with abstract moral theorizing and with the moral status of real-world actions, situations, and traits. For instance, the Greek philosopher Pythagoras (c. 570–490 BCE) seems to have objected to eating certain parts of animals, certain animals, or all animals. Thousands of years later, Bentham provides another illustration of applied ethics' long history. Propelled by his philosophies, Bentham advocated prison reform, police reform, and more. In the 1970s, applied ethics began to take on a life of its own among scholars and members of other disciplines, namely, medicine, business, and science. Applied ethics also occurs in law, engineering, and the social sciences. Among the important applied ethics texts published in the 1970s are Jonathan Glover's Causing Death and Saving Lives and Peter Singer's Practical Ethics.
Approaches in Applied Ethics
One might wonder exactly how philosophers apply ethics. Applied ethics can begin with a theory, or it can begin with a real-world problem. The former, the top-down approach, engenders great skepticism, partly because a divide appears between theory and practice. The complexity and variability of the real world resist easy codification into widely applicable theories, so beginning with theory—trying to foist a (more or less) tidy set of principles upon the messy real world—risks neglecting important considerations. For example, Kant notoriously held that lying is categorically wrong in all instances. But most would consider it right for a homeowner to lie to a Nazi soldier who knocked on the homeowner's door in search of Jews hiding from persecution if the homeowner were hiding Jews. Here, the purported moral principle that one should never lie fails to account for certain real-world factors, such as the rise of a genocidally antisemitic regime, the orders of its leadership, the attendant activities of its foot soldiers, and the resistance by ordinary citizens. In other words, applying a generalized norm to a specific situation often turns out to be very difficult.
For this and many other reasons, some applied ethicists prefer a bottom-up approach that begins with real-world problems. These applied ethicists look first to social arrangements already in place, specific situations that have already led to insights, and comparisons of specific situations to derive principles that might help resolve a given real-world problem. Such derived principles are tentative and prone to fine-tuning over time or even rejection but authoritative when derived and utilized. The bottom-up emphasis on the improvement over time of moral principles allows for the conservative retention of moral insights hard-won via deliberative struggle. The bottom-up approach respects accumulated moral wisdom. However, such approaches also run into their fair share of problems. For instance, comparing and contrasting specific cases with each other seems to require the use of rules. Two cases can only be similar if they share some feature, and that feature becomes the basis for a derived rule or principle under which both cases fall. But derived rules or principles, as they're stretched to cover more than individual cases, begin to look like the general principles that bottom-up approaches were meant to eschew. Such principles appear untethered from the individual cases that inspired them, leaving one to wonder what the value of the bottom-up model was in the first place. As with most debates in philosophy, the debate over the correct or best way to do applied ethics is not likely to die down anytime soon.
Applying Ethics: Areas of Concern
The problems applied ethics focuses on can arise in many public and private areas. Applied ethics include the following overlapping domains:
- Bioethics: Although the term originally referred exclusively to environmental ethics, it has grown to cover ethical problems in biology, medicine, and elsewhere.
- Business ethics: As businesses grow larger, they stand powerfully positioned to affect the lives of many real people, adding pressure to understand the right and wrong of those businesses' internal practices and the right and wrong of their products and services.
- Ethics in politics and the law: Concrete cases are regularly adjudicated in courts and used to inform public policy decisions, such that citizens' lives are profoundly affected.
- Military ethics: Decisions about national defense and the prosecution of wars raise important ethical questions.
- Technological ethics: The widespread diffusion of new technologies into human societies brings unique moral questions needing answers.
