Applied ethics
Applied ethics uses moral principles and reasoning to assess practical questions in fields such as medicine, business, and public policy.
Medical ethics: The study of moral questions in medicine, health care, and biomedical research. It addresses consent, treatment, and professional duties in clinical practice.
Ethical decision-making: The process of identifying, assessing, and choosing among options with moral significance. It is the practical work applied ethics seeks to guide.
Normative ethics: The study of principles and standards that determine how people ought to act. Applied ethics draws on its accounts of right action and moral obligation.
Metaethics: The study of the meaning, justification, and status of moral judgments. It examines what ethical claims mean rather than directly resolving practical cases.
Business ethics: The study of moral responsibilities and conduct in business and commerce. It examines duties to workers, customers, owners, and communities.
Principlism: An approach to bioethics that evaluates cases through principles such as autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. It shows how general principles can organize analysis of concrete cases.
Moral principles: General standards used to evaluate actions, policies, and institutions as right or wrong. They provide claims that can be tested against practical cases.
Moral particularism: The view that moral judgment cannot be fully governed by fixed general principles. It challenges the assumption that practical cases should be settled by applying stable rules.
Environmental ethics: The study of moral relationships between humans, nonhuman life, and the natural environment. It applies ethical reasoning to pollution, conservation, and obligations to future generations.
Casuistry: A method of moral reasoning that resolves cases by comparing them with paradigm examples. It offers a case-centered alternative to starting from abstract rules.