Applied Ethics

Applied ethics is the philosophical examination, from a moral standpoint, of particular issues in private and public life that 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 human life. Bioethics, for example, is concerned with identifying the correct approach to matters such as euthanasia, or the allocation of scarce health resources, or the use of human embryos in research. Environmental ethics is concerned with questions such as the duties of duty of 'whistleblowers' to the general public as opposed to their employers. As such, it is a study which is as much as professional philosophers.

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 an organization
• Organizational ethics, or ethics among organizations
• Social ethics, or ethics among nations and as one global unit