What is "applied ethics"

n. (context ethics English) The branch of ethics that examines questions of moral right and wrong arising in specific areas of practical concern, as, for example, in medicine or business.

Applied ethics is the philosophical examination, from a moral standpoint, of particular issues in private and public life which are matters of moral judgment. It is thus the attempts to use philosophical methods to identify the morally correct course of action in various fields of everyday life. For example, the bioethics community is concerned with identifying the correct approach to legal 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 questions such as the responsibility of government and corporations to clean up pollution. Social ethics includes the duties or duty of 'whistleblowers' to the general public as opposed to their loyalty to their employers. As such, it is an area of professional philosophy that is relatively well paid and highly valued both within and outside of academia.

Applied ethics is distinguished from normative ethics, which concerns what people should believe to be right and wrong, and from meta-ethics, which concerns the nature of moral statements.

An emerging typology for applied ethics (Porter, 2006) uses six domains to help improve organizations and social issues at the national and global level:

• Decision ethics, or ethical theories and ethical decision processes
• Professional ethics, or ethics to improve professionalism
• Clinical ethics, or ethics to improve our basic health needs
• Business ethics, or individual based morals to improve ethics in a business environment
• Organizational ethics, or ethics among organizations
• Social ethics, or ethics among nations and as one global unit