Macroethics and microethics

Macroethics concerns the ethical effects of professions, technologies, and institutions on society; microethics concerns choices and relationships within individual professional practice.

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Professional ethics: Standards and principles governing conduct within a profession. Macroethics and microethics identify societal and interpersonal scales within professional ethical life.
Responsible innovation: An approach to research and innovation that anticipates and addresses ethical and societal impacts. It brings macroethical concerns into decisions made throughout innovation processes.
Ethics: The systematic study of right and wrong conduct, values, and obligations. Macroethics and microethics distinguish two scales within ethical inquiry.
Structural injustice: Harmful inequality produced or sustained by interacting social institutions and practices. It shows how ordinary professional decisions can contribute to harms beyond any one relationship.
Applied ethics: The use of ethical theories and principles to examine practical problems. The distinction is one way applied ethics organizes problems by their scale.
Technology assessment: The systematic study of the likely consequences of technologies for society. It evaluates the broad impacts that distinguish macroethical questions.
Professional responsibility: The duties professionals bear because of their expertise, roles, and effects on others. It links individual decisions to obligations created by professional roles and institutions.
Conflict of interest: A situation in which competing interests may compromise judgment or action. Individual conflicts can signal incentives that create broader professional or institutional risks.
Engineering ethics: The study and practice of ethical responsibilities in engineering. Engineering ethics uses the distinction to connect design decisions with social consequences.
Research ethics: Principles and practices governing the responsible conduct of research. It spans individual researcher conduct and the societal consequences of research systems.