Applied ethics refers to the practical application of moral considerations.

It
is ethics with respect to real-world actions and their moral considerations in the
areas of private and public life, the professions, health, technology, law, and
leadership. For example, the bioethics community is concerned with identifying
the correct approach to moral issues in the life sciences, such as euthanasia, the
allocation of scarce health resources, or the use of human embryos in
research. Environmental ethics is concerned with ecological issues such as the
responsibility of government and corporations to clean up pollution. Business
ethics includes questions regarding the duties or duty of 'whistleblowers' to the
general public or their loyalty to their employers.

Applied ethics is a branch of ethics devoted to the treatment of moral problems,

practices, and policies in personal life, professions, technology, and
government. In contrast to traditional ethical theory—concerned with purely
theoretical problems such as, for example, the development of a general
criterion of rightness—applied ethics takes its point of departure in practical
normative challenges. Along with general overviews and journals, nine central
branches of applied ethics are added, with four or five references in connection
to each branch. It should be noted that these branches constitute only a selection
among the plethora of disciplines within AE. Moreover, there is some overlap
among the different areas. For instance, as ethical discussions on these fields are
evolving and growing, animal ethics, environmental ethics, and the ethics of
human enhancement have developed into separate branches of applied ethics
(originally, they were all part of bioethics) with their own anthologies and
monographs. Important areas that are not mentioned under separate sections are,
for example, “medical ethics,” “feminism,” “research ethics,” and “media
ethics.” However, the first three of these subjects are either covered
by bioethics or treated separately under other branches such as environmental
ethics or human enhancement and ethics and the latter is covered by computer
and information ethics.

Applied ethics has expanded the study of ethics beyond the realms of academic
philosophical discourse. The field of applied ethics, as it appears today,
emerged from debate surrounding rapid medical and technological advances in
the early 1970s and is now established as a subdiscipline of moral philosophy.
However, applied ethics is, by its very nature, a multi-professional subject
because it requires specialist understanding of the potential ethical issues in
fields like medicine, business or information technology. Nowadays, ethical
codes of conduct exist in almost every profession.

An applied ethics approach to the examination of moral dilemmas can take

many different forms but one of the most influential and most widely utilised
approaches in bioethics and health care ethics is the four-principle approach
developed by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress. The four-principle
approach, commonly termed principlism, entails consideration and application
of four prima facie ethical principles: autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence,
and justice.

Applied ethics is distinguished from normative ethics, which concerns standards

for right and wrong behavior, and from meta-ethics, which concerns the nature
of ethical properties, statements, attitudes, and judgments.

Whilst these three areas of ethics appear to be distinct they are also interrelated.
The use of an applied ethics approach often draws upon certain normative
ethical theories like the following:

1. Utilitarianism, where the practical consequences of various policies are

evaluated on the assumption that the right policy will be the one which
 results in the greatest happiness. This theory's main developments came
from Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill who distinguished between
an act and rule utilitarianist morality. Later developments have also
adjusted the theory, most notably Henry Sidgwick who introduced the
idea of motive or intent in morality, and Peter Singer who introduced the
idea of preference in moral decision making.
2. Deontological ethics, notions based on 'rules' i.e. that there is an
obligation to perform the 'right' action, regardless of actual consequences
(epitomized by Immanuel Kant's notion of the Categorical
Imperative which was the centre to Kant's ethical theory based on duty).
Another key deontological theory is Natural Law, which was heavily
developed by Thomas Aquinas and is an important part of the Catholic
Church's teaching on Morals.
3. Virtue ethics, derived from Aristotle's and Confucius's notions, which
asserts that the right action will be that chosen by a suitably 'virtuous'
agent.

Sometimes, these normative ethical theories clash which poses challenges when
trying to resolve real-world ethical dilemmas. One approach which attempts to
overcome the seemingly impossible divide between deontology and
utilitarianism (of which the divide is caused by the opposite takings of
an absolute and relativist moral view) is case-based reasoning, also known
as casuistry. Casuistry does not begin with theory, rather it starts with the
immediate facts of a real and concrete case. While casuistry makes use of
ethical theory, it does not view ethical theory as the most important feature of
moral reasoning. Casuists, like Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin (The Abuse
of Casuistry 1988), challenge the traditional paradigm of applied ethics. Instead
of starting from theory and applying theory to a particular case, casuists start
with the particular case itself and then ask what morally significant features
(including both theory and practical considerations) ought to be considered for
that particular case. In their observations of medical ethics committees, Jonsen
and Toulmin note that a consensus on particularly problematic moral cases
often emerges when participants focus on the facts of the case, rather than
on ideology or theory. Thus, a Rabbi, a Catholic priest, and an agnostic might
agree that, in this particular case, the best approach is to withhold extraordinary
medical care, while disagreeing on the reasons that support their individual
positions. By focusing on cases and not on theory, those engaged in moral
debate increase the possibility of agreement.

The most striking development in the study of ethics since the mid-1960s was
the growth of interest among philosophers in practical, or applied, ethics—i.e.,
the application of normative ethical theories to practical problems. This is not,
admittedly, a totally new departure. From Plato onward, moral philosophers
have concerned themselves with practical questions, including suicide, the
exposure of infants, the treatment of women, and the proper behaviour of public
officials. Christian philosophers, notably Augustine and Aquinas, examined
with great care such matters as when a war is just, whether it is ever right to tell
a lie, and whether a Christian woman does wrong by committing suicide to save
herself from rape. Hobbes had an eminently practical purpose in writing
his Leviathan, and Hume wrote about the ethics of suicide. The British
utilitarians were very much concerned with practical problems; indeed, they
considered social reform to be the aim of their philosophy. Thus, Bentham
wrote on electoral and prison reform and animal rights, and Mill discussed the
power of the state to interfere with the liberty of its citizens, the status of
women, capital punishment, and the right of one state to invade another to
prevent it from committing atrocities against its own people.
Nevertheless, during the first six decades of the 20th century, moral
philosophers largely neglected applied ethics—something that now seems all
but incredible, considering the traumatic events through which most of them
lived. The most notable exception, Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), seems to
have regarded his writings on ethical topics as largely separate from his
philosophical work and did not attempt to develop his ethical views in any
systematic or rigorous fashion.
The prevailing view of this period was that moral philosophy is quite separate
from “moralizing,” a task best left to preachers. What was not generally
considered was whether moral philosophers could, without merely preaching,
make an effective contribution to discussions of practical issues involving
difficult ethical questions. The value of such work began to be widely
recognized only during the 1960s, when first the U.S. civil rights movement and
subsequently the Vietnam War and the growth of student political activism
started to draw philosophers into discussions of the ethical issues of
equality, justice, war, and civil disobedience.

Textbooks

A number of textbooks exist within applied ethics. But as the field is always
expanding and at the same time becoming more and more specialized, it is very
difficult to give a fair overview of the most important textbooks within applied
ethics. However, there is no doubt that some of the most influential works are
the pioneering works Singer 1979 on issues like animal ethics, abortion, and
environmental ethics and Glover 1977 on the ethics of causing death and saving
lives. A number of textbooks cover a wide variety of subjects within applied
ethics, for example, Harris 1985, Oderberg 2000, and Singer 1979. Besides
these, splendid textbooks exist that have a more narrow scope, such as Rachels
1986 on euthanasia, Bowie 1989 on business ethics, Sumner 2004 on free
speech , and Husak 2002 on the legalization of drugs.