importance of applied ethics essay

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Exploring Applied Ethics
Types of philosophy

From scientific research to everyday decision-making, applied ethics plays an important role in modern society. It is a field of study that investigates the moral dimensions of human behavior and institutions, aiming to understand how ethical considerations can be incorporated into public policy, corporate decisions, and individual actions. This article will explore the basics of applied ethics and discuss how it can be used to help promote justice and well-being in our world. Applied ethics is not just a philosophical concept but rather a practical approach to decision-making that can help shape our world for the better.

It is an important part of the study of ethics, as it focuses on understanding how ethical theories and principles can be applied in a practical way to real-world situations. Applied ethics is used to evaluate the morality of human actions, decisions, and policies, and to guide ethical decision-making. The various branches of applied ethics examine different aspects of ethical decision-making and behavior. These branches include medical ethics, business ethics, environmental ethics, bioethics, and computer ethics. Each branch looks at how ethical theories and principles can be applied in a particular context.

For example, medical ethics examines how ethical principles such as autonomy, beneficence, and non-maleficence should be applied when making decisions related to health care. Business ethics looks at how ethical principles such as fairness, honesty, and respect for others should be applied to business practices. And environmental ethics examines how ethical principles such as sustainability and stewardship should be applied when making decisions related to the environment. Two of the most common ethical theories examined in applied ethics are utilitarianism and deontology . Utilitarianism is a consequentialist theory that looks at the consequences of an action or decision in order to determine its morality.

Deontology is a non-consequentialist theory that looks at the intention behind an action or decision in order to determine its morality. Both of these theories are used to evaluate ethical issues in everyday life. Examples of how applied ethics are used in everyday life include medical ethics, business ethics, and environmental ethics. In medical ethics, ethical principles such as autonomy, beneficence, and non-maleficence are used to evaluate medical decisions. In business ethics, ethical principles such as fairness, honesty, and respect for others are used to evaluate business practices.

And in environmental ethics, ethical principles such as sustainability and stewardship are used to evaluate decisions related to the environment. There are several challenges facing applied ethics today. One challenge is the need for more rigorous research into ethical issues. Another challenge is the importance of ethical decision-making in a world where technology is rapidly changing the way we interact with each other and our environment. Finally, there is the challenge of ensuring that ethical decisions are applied in a consistent manner across all contexts. This article has provided an introduction to applied ethics, a field of philosophy that seeks to understand ethical problems arising from human behavior and social contexts.

Applied ethics is studied and applied through different branches, such as bioethics, environmental ethics, and business ethics. These branches provide guidance on ethical decisions and help us to understand the potential consequences of our actions. Additionally, applied ethics can be used to inform public policy decisions and can provide insight into ethical issues that have global implications. In conclusion, applied ethics is a field of philosophy that seeks to explore ethical problems and provides guidance on ethical decision-making.

Examples of Applied Ethics

Medical ethics, business ethics, environmental ethics, challenges facing applied ethics.

While many ethical theories have been developed over the years, they often lack the empirical evidence necessary to back up their claims. This means that much of the work in applied ethics can be subjective, which can lead to inconsistent conclusions when examining similar ethical issues. To ensure the reliability and accuracy of applied ethics, more research must be conducted to provide evidence to support or refute existing theories. Another challenge facing applied ethics is the importance of ethical decision-making. Applied ethics examines the ethical implications of different actions and decisions, but it is ultimately up to individuals to decide what is ethically right or wrong.

Branches of Applied Ethics

It is divided into several branches which are used to address different issues and scenarios. These branches include ethical theories such as utilitarianism and deontology, as well as ethical principles such as autonomy, beneficence, and non-maleficence. Utilitarianism is an ethical theory that states that the right action should bring the greatest good to the greatest number of people. It is based on the principle of maximizing utility and seeks to promote the greatest overall happiness for all involved. Deontology, on the other hand, is an ethical theory that states that actions should be done because they are intrinsically right or wrong, not because of their consequences.

This theory emphasizes moral duty and responsibility. The ethical principles of autonomy, beneficence, and non-maleficence are also used in applied ethics. Autonomy refers to the freedom to make decisions without external interference or coercion. Beneficence is the principle of doing good and promoting the welfare of others. Non-maleficence refers to the obligation to do no harm and not inflict suffering on others. These various branches of applied ethics are used in everyday life, from business decisions to medical treatments.

What is Applied Ethics?

It enables us to make better decisions by giving us a framework for examining ethical dilemmas and understanding their implications. Applied ethics also helps us to develop more consistent moral standards, which can be applied across different contexts. Applied ethics is studied through the use of case studies and simulations, which allow students to analyze real-world scenarios and draw conclusions about the right course of action. It is also applied in professional contexts, such as in medicine, law, and business, where ethical considerations must be taken into account when making decisions. Finally, applied ethics is used to inform public policy decisions, as it provides a framework for evaluating the ethical implications of different policy options. Applied ethics differs from other branches of philosophy in that it focuses on the practical application of moral principles to specific cases and situations.

While other branches of philosophy may look at the abstract concepts or theoretical frameworks that underlie ethical considerations, applied ethics focuses on how these ideas are actually applied in the real world. This practical focus makes applied ethics an important tool for understanding complex ethical issues and making better decisions. In conclusion, this article has provided a comprehensive overview of applied ethics. It has outlined the importance of this field of philosophy and how it is studied and applied in different contexts. Examples have been provided to illustrate how applied ethics can be used to address ethical dilemmas in everyday life.

Additionally, this article has explored the various branches of applied ethics, as well as the unique challenges that practitioners face in this field. Overall, applied ethics provides a valuable framework for understanding how ethical principles shape our decisions and actions. Applied ethics is an important field of study with implications for individuals and society. As the world continues to grapple with complex moral issues, understanding how to apply ethical principles to real-world problems is increasingly important. By exploring the various branches of applied ethics, we can better understand how to make decisions that are ethically sound and contribute to a more just and equitable society.

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1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Philosophy, One Thousand Words at a Time

Applied Ethics

Author: Chelsea Haramia Category: Ethics Word Count: 855

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1. What Applied Ethicists Do

The modern-day, direct study of applied ethics arguably began with Judith Jarvis Thomson’s 1971 article “A Defense of Abortion.” 1 Thomson argued that it is permissible to have an abortion even if the fetus is a person with a right to life. Given that many actual abortion opponents argue from the claim that the fetus has a right to life to the impermissibility of abortion, Thomson not only uncovered important moral considerations embedded in a real-world debate, but also, she did so by paying heed to actual claims common in the discourse. Her work spawned a lively ethical debate about the issue of abortion that is still in progress, and many since have taken up this approach by applying philosophical analysis to concrete ethical issues.

To date, there are several areas of applied ethical study. Given their situational nature, they are often distinct from one another, though they regularly employ similar methods (detailed below). The following is a representative list of applied ethics foci:

Animal Ethics: e.g.: Is it permissible to eat meat? 2
Biomedical Ethics: e.g.: On whom are we allowed to perform medical tests? 3
Business Ethics: e.g.: Do corporations have moral status? 4
Environmental Ethics: e.g.: Ought we curb climate change for the sake of future generations? 5
Information Ethics: e.g.: May I pirate music? 6
Law: e.g.: Should personal, recreational drug use be illegal? 7
Philosophy of the Family: e.g.: What do children owe their parents? 8
Practical Distributive Justice: e.g.: To what extent ought we give to charity? 9
Procreative Ethics: e.g.: Is it permissible to abort a fetus? 10
Sexual Ethics: e.g.: Should prostitution be legal? 11

Notice that applied ethicists qua applied ethicists are more concerned with particular cases than with more abstract theoretical questions. They aim to apply their ethical training to the study of actual ethical situations, and to draw conclusions about the moral status of scenarios that people out in the world actually encounter, and of situations that have real, practical import.

2. Methods in Applied Ethics

Applied ethicists often employ the methods of argument from analogy and bare-difference argument . Both methods help to uncover the relevant moral components in practical situations, and they thereby help us to draw conclusions about actual cases. Applied ethicists also have the advantage of avoiding arguing from a baseline normative ethical theory, for applied ethicists cannot count on their interlocutors’ adherence to some particular theory; it is preferable to appeal to allegedly widely-shared intuitions.

A. Arguments from Analogy

Here is Thomson’s famous example of an applied ethics question that employs an argument from analogy: 12

If you woke up one day to find that you had been kidnapped by the Society of Music Lovers, who had hooked you up to an unconscious, famous violinist who needed to be attached to your body for nine months in order to survive, would it be permissible to unhook yourself and go about your own business?

While this case might seem at first glance to be overly fantastical, it is meant to serve as an analogy to certain abortion cases.

Of course, there are many ways in which the two cases are disanalogous; the applied ethicist often must explain why a given difference is not a morally relevant difference. In these two cases, the similarities match the morally relevant factors—someone ends up connected to another moral subject for nine months in order to ensure that subject’s survival. So, by creating a relevantly analogous case, and by judging the answers provided in response to the questions raised by the analogous case, the applied ethicist can then uncover relevant intuitions and construct an argument regarding a very practical, real-world issue—abortion.

B. B are-Difference Arguments

Here also is a famous example that employs the method of bare-difference argument: 13

Smith and Jones both stand to split a large inheritance with their respective cousins; each resolves to kill his cousin; Smith drowns his cousin; and Jones lets his cousin drown.

Arguably, the only difference—the bare difference—between what Smith and Jones did is that Smith killed his cousin and Jones let his cousin die, and we now have a bare-difference argument.

Is Smith morally worse than Jones, or are they equally bad? Answering this question will help us to determine whether there is a moral difference between killing someone and letting someone die. If it turns out that there is no moral difference between killing and letting die, then we can apply this discovery to questions of euthanasia, which require us to ask whether it is permissible to kill a terminally ill patient rather than allowing her to die by permitting the illness to take its course.

As you can see, both bare-difference arguments and arguments from analogy can be quite illuminating when it comes to assessing applied ethical questions. Ultimately, these assessments can then allow us to go out into the world and act as responsible moral agents when we encounter or judge actual ethical cases.

3. Conclusion

Philosophers who study applied ethics look to the world around them and analyze the ethical problems they find. By doing so, the applied ethicist is able to use philosophy as a tool to address important moral issues in various practical disciplines.

1 Thomson, Judith Jarvis. “A Defense of Abortion” in Philosophy and Public Affairs 1:1 (Autumn 1971): 47–66 . Certainly, previous authors had addressed applied-ethics issues, but typically as part of larger works that focus on ethics in general, on social and political philosophy, or on normative ethics. See, e.g.: Kant, Immanuel. 1999. Practical Philosophy . Tr. Mary J. Gregor and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press ; Bentham, Jeremy. 1982. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation . Ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart. London: Methuen . Notice that our examples of applied-ethics questions in the following paragraph are typically focused on present-day worries, which would be mostly unfamiliar to pre-20 th Century writers.

2 See, for example: Norcross, Alastair. “Puppies, Pigs, and People: Eating Meat and Marginal Cases” in Philosophical Perspectives 18 (2004) .

3 See, for example: Brody, Baruch A. The Ethics of Biomedical Research: An International Perspective , Oxford: Oxford University Press (1998) .

4 See, for example: French, Peter. Collective and Corporate Responsibility . New York: Columbia University Press (1984) .

5 See, for example: Gardiner, Stephen. A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change . Oxford: Oxford University Press (2011) .

6 See, for example: Yoon, Cheolho. “Theory of Planned Behavior and Ethics Theory in Digital Piracy: An Integrated Model” in The Journal of Business Ethics 100 (2011): 405-417 .

7 See, for example: Huemer, Michael. “America’s Unjust Drug War” in The New Prohibition, edited by Bill Masters, St. Louis: Accurate Press (2004): 133-144 .

8 See, for example: English, Jane. “What Do Grown Children Owe Their Parents?” in Aging and Ethics , edited by Nancy Jecker, The Humana Press, Inc. (1992): 147-154 .

9 See, for example: Singer, Peter. The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty , New York: Random House (2009) .

10 See, for example: Boonin, David. A Defense of Abortion . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2003) .

11 See, for example: Nussbaum, Martha. Sex and Social Justice , Oxford: Oxford University Press (1999) .

12 Thomson, Judith Jarvis. op cit .

13 Rachels, James. “Active and Passive Euthanasia” in The New England Journal of Medicine , Vol. 292 (Jan. 9 1975): 78-80.

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About the author.

Chelsea Haramia is an associate professor of philosophy at Spring Hill College. She has a Ph.D. in philosophy from CU Boulder, a graduate certificate in gender and women’s studies from CU Boulder, and a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is currently interested in metaethics, population and procreation ethics, environmental ethics, bioethics, and feminist philosophy. She once did sixteen backflips in a row, but these days she mostly practices mental gymnastics. ChelseaHaramia.com

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Applied Ethics by Thomas Søbirk Petersen , Jesper Ryberg LAST REVIEWED: 25 September 2019 LAST MODIFIED: 25 September 2019 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0006

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 six to eight references in connection to each branch. It should be noted that these branches constitute only a selection among the plethora of disciplines within applied ethics. Moreover, some overlap is found among the different areas.

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, undoubtedly some of the most influential works are the pioneering books 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 Broom 2012 on climate change, Bowie 2017 on business ethics, Sumner 2004 on free speech and pornography, and Husak 2002 on the legalization of drugs.

Bowie, Norman. Business Ethics: A Kantian Perspective . 2d ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press 2017.

DOI: 10.1017/9781316343210

Concise and clearly written introduction to several key subjects within business ethics. Contains topics such as “the right purpose of a business,” “the internal and external regulation of businesses,” and “the use of ethical codes within businesses.”

Broom, John. Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World . New York: Norton, 2012.

Very clearly written book in which the author not only presents an overview of climate science but also argues how we as individuals or as a political collective should solve the problems of global warming.

Glover, Jonathan. Causing Death and Saving Lives . Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1977.

This is a modern classic within applied ethics. The book gives a lucid introduction to the ethics of abortion, infanticide, suicide, euthanasia, capital punishment, and war. It also contains a concise and introductory chapter on the method of applied ethics.

Harris, John. Value of Life: An Introduction to Medical Ethics . London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985.

An introduction that, due to its time of publication, leaves out many areas that are currently dealt with in medical ethics. However, this is compensated for by an excellent utilitarian treatment of issues such as abortion, euthanasia, artificial reproduction, death, and the morality of sex. All chapters are lucid and readable. This book has been reprinted several times.

Husak, Douglas N. Legalize This! The Case for Decriminalizing Drugs . London: Verso, 2002.

A very readable book for all interested in not only the moral and empirical complexity surrounding the criminalization of drug use but also the pros and cons of criminalizing acts in general.

Oderberg, David S. Applied Ethics: A Non-consequentialist Approach . Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.

This volume is a good example of a virtue theory approach to applied ethics. An approach that is less represented in the literature in comparison with the usual utilitarian- or deontological-based literature in applied ethics. In a clear and systematic manner, it treats the following subjects: abortion, animals, euthanasia, capital punishment, and war.

Singer, Peter. Practical Ethics . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

A remarkably lucid and readable introduction to applied ethics. It covers a wide range of areas such as abortion, animal ethics, civil disobedience, environmental ethics, and our obligations to refugees and world hunger. The book has been reprinted several times, including a 2011 third edition. In this latter edition all chapters have been revised and updated and a new chapter has been added on climate ethics.

Sumner, L. W. The Hateful and the Obscene: Studies in the Limits of Free Expression . Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

DOI: 10.3138/9781442681439

From a mainly utilitarian perspective, the focus of this book is the ethical perspectives of free speech and pornography. Some legal cases are discussed at length, and the ethical framework of John Stuart Mill’s harm principle is used to focus the discussion.

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Applied Ethics

Applied ethics, also called practical ethics, is the application of ethics to real-world problems.

Applied ethics, also called practical ethics, is the application of ethics to real-world problems. Practical ethics attempts to answer the question of how people should act in specific situations. For example, is it ethical for a business owner to bluff during negotiations with another company? Or, is it morally permissible for a doctor to engage in mercy killing when a terminal cancer patient begs to be put out of her misery?

Medical ethics, business ethics, engineering ethics, and the like are all branches of applied ethics. Applied ethics is more specific than normative ethics, which is a branch of philosophy that develops moral theories – such as the ethics of care or deontology – about how people should behave. Practical ethics is also different from metaethics, a branch of philosophy that asks questions about the nature of ethics such as, “what is morality?”

Some philosophers argue that real-world ethics should start with moral theory. But finding agreement on which moral theory to apply can be difficult. With a practical approach to ethics, people don’t need to agree on a moral theory. Instead, they can agree to solutions to ethical dilemmas by reviewing the facts and related harms of a specific situation. This is one of the key strengths of applied ethics.

Related Terms

Consequentialism

Consequentialism is an ethical theory that judges an action’s moral correctness by its consequences.

Deontology is an ethical theory that uses rules to discern the moral course of action.

Hedonism is a form of consequentialism that approves of actions that produce pleasure and avoid pain.

Moral Absolutism

Moral Absolutism is a form of deontology that asserts that certain actions are intrinsically right or wrong.

Moral Philosophy

Moral Philosophy studies what is right and wrong, and related philosophical issues.

Virtue Ethics

Virtue Ethics is a normative philosophical approach that urges people to live a moral life by cultivating virtuous habits.

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Applied Ethics

What is applied ethics.

Think about a situation where you have to choose between telling the truth, which might hurt someone’s feelings, or keeping a secret to make them happy. Deciding what to do in that moment is where applied ethics comes in. It’s the part of the big subject of ethics that is all about using our ideas of right and wrong in the real world. We use applied ethics to figure out how to behave in everyday life. Let’s break it down to two simple definitions:

First, it’s like a GPS for making choices. Applied ethics gives us directions on how to act in ways that are fair, nice, and thoughtful. Think about it as getting advice on how to be a good person when you face tricky problems. Second, it’s like a bunch of tools in a toolbox. Each tool is a different rule or idea about what’s good or bad, and we pick the right tool for the job when we run into complicated issues like how to protect the environment or take care of sick people.

It’s not just about thinking deep thoughts or having good intentions, either. Applied ethics is about rolling up your sleeves and putting those good thoughts into action, whether you’re in a hospital, a courtroom, a business, or just in your daily life.

How to Guide to Applied Ethics

Let’s make a four-step plan to use applied ethics:

Spot what’s going on and what the problem is.
Think about who will be impacted by what you choose.
Bring to mind the values and rules you know, like being just or true.
Decide the best you can, using all that thinking and the details of the issue at hand.

This plan is like a map that helps you navigate through tough decisions. By following these steps, we can try to fix problems in a way that sticks to ethical rules and shows care for everyone involved.

Types of Applied Ethics

Applied ethics has a bunch of different types, each focusing on certain areas of life:

Medical Ethics – Decisions in hospitals and clinics belong here, like who gets treatment when there’s not enough to go around.
Business Ethics – This is about how companies act, ensuring they’re fair to workers and customers and make safe products.
Environmental Ethics – This one’s about caring for Earth and all its living things.
Legal Ethics – Judges and lawyers use this to keep the law fair and respectful.

Examples of Applied Ethics

When a doctor decides who gets a new medicine when there’s not much of it, that’s medical ethics because they are using fairness and care to choose.
If a business has to pick between making more money or keeping their workers from getting hurt, that’s business ethics since they’re balancing success with people’s safety.
When a town chooses whether to build houses on a park, it’s environmental ethics because they’re looking at what’s best for people and nature.
If a lawyer defends someone they know did a bad thing because everyone has the right to a defense, that’s legal ethics. They follow rules about justice, even when it’s hard.

Why is it Important?

Applied ethics is a big deal because it helps us not be selfish and to think about others and the results of our actions. It guides us to make choices that are fair and keeps us from just doing whatever we want without caring if it’s right or wrong. For instance, when we follow rules in sports or games, it’s so that everyone has a fair chance to play and enjoy. Without those rules and fair play, the game wouldn’t be fun or fair. That’s kind of what applied ethics does for all of life.

Origin of Applied Ethics

People have been asking what’s right or wrong for thousands of years. But this idea of actually using ethical thinking for real-life problems got a big push in the 1970s when new medical technologies created situations no one had faced before and needed ethical thinking to solve.

Controversies in Applied Ethics

But there’s no perfect answer in applied ethics. People have major arguments about tough topics because everyone has different values and ideas. These debates show why applied ethics is both necessary and challenging.

When is it ever okay to end a life? Like in hard choices about euthanasia or putting someone to death who did a terrible crime?
Can we use animals to test medicines that might save people?
Should companies be able to know private stuff about us if it helps them make money, or is that crossing a line?

Final Thoughts on Applied Ethics

So, applied ethics is our tool for tackling real situations using what we believe about right and wrong. It’s like having a wise friend to help us think through tricky choices so we can do good things and be fair and kind. It’s key to our lives because what we decide can make a wave of change, good or bad, for others. This part of ethics goes beyond the classroom; it’s an everyday guide to living in a thoughtful, respectful way.

As we face knotty problems and make choices, applied ethics is our compass. It helps us see the different sides of an issue and guides us in making thoughtful choices. It’s not just philosophy; it’s a real-life tool for making the world a fairer place, one decision at a time.

What is Ethics?

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Ethics is based on well-founded standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues.

Some years ago, sociologist Raymond Baumhart asked business people, "What does ethics mean to you?" Among their replies were the following:

"Ethics has to do with what my feelings tell me is right or wrong." "Ethics has to do with my religious beliefs." "Being ethical is doing what the law requires." "Ethics consists of the standards of behavior our society accepts." "I don't know what the word means."

These replies might be typical of our own. The meaning of "ethics" is hard to pin down, and the views many people have about ethics are shaky.

Like Baumhart's first respondent, many people tend to equate ethics with their feelings. But being ethical is clearly not a matter of following one's feelings. A person following his or her feelings may recoil from doing what is right. In fact, feelings frequently deviate from what is ethical.

Nor should one identify ethics with religion. Most religions, of course, advocate high ethical standards. Yet if ethics were confined to religion, then ethics would apply only to religious people. But ethics applies as much to the behavior of the atheist as to that of the devout religious person. Religion can set high ethical standards and can provide intense motivations for ethical behavior. Ethics, however, cannot be confined to religion nor is it the same as religion.

Being ethical is also not the same as following the law. The law often incorporates ethical standards to which most citizens subscribe. But laws, like feelings, can deviate from what is ethical. Our own pre-Civil War slavery laws and the old apartheid laws of present-day South Africa are grotesquely obvious examples of laws that deviate from what is ethical.

Finally, being ethical is not the same as doing "whatever society accepts." In any society, most people accept standards that are, in fact, ethical. But standards of behavior in society can deviate from what is ethical. An entire society can become ethically corrupt. Nazi Germany is a good example of a morally corrupt society.

Moreover, if being ethical were doing "whatever society accepts," then to find out what is ethical, one would have to find out what society accepts. To decide what I should think about abortion, for example, I would have to take a survey of American society and then conform my beliefs to whatever society accepts. But no one ever tries to decide an ethical issue by doing a survey. Further, the lack of social consensus on many issues makes it impossible to equate ethics with whatever society accepts. Some people accept abortion but many others do not. If being ethical were doing whatever society accepts, one would have to find an agreement on issues which does not, in fact, exist.

What, then, is ethics? Ethics is two things. First, ethics refers to well-founded standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues. Ethics, for example, refers to those standards that impose the reasonable obligations to refrain from rape, stealing, murder, assault, slander, and fraud. Ethical standards also include those that enjoin virtues of honesty, compassion, and loyalty. And, ethical standards include standards relating to rights, such as the right to life, the right to freedom from injury, and the right to privacy. Such standards are adequate standards of ethics because they are supported by consistent and well-founded reasons.

Secondly, ethics refers to the study and development of one's ethical standards. As mentioned above, feelings, laws, and social norms can deviate from what is ethical. So it is necessary to constantly examine one's standards to ensure that they are reasonable and well-founded. Ethics also means, then, the continuous effort of studying our own moral beliefs and our moral conduct, and striving to ensure that we, and the institutions we help to shape, live up to standards that are reasonable and solidly-based.

This article appeared originally in Issues in Ethics IIE V1 N1 (Fall 1987). Revised in 2010.

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Applied ethics

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Table Of Contents

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 .

Applied ethics soon became part of the philosophy curriculum of most universities in many different countries. Here it is not possible to do more than briefly mention some of the major areas of applied ethics and point to the issues that they raise.

Since much of the early impetus for the 20th-century revival of applied ethics came from the U.S. civil rights movement, topics such as equality, human rights , and justice were prominent from the beginning. The initial focus, especially in the United States , was on racial and sexual equality . Since there was a consensus that outright discrimination against women and members of racial minority groups (notably African Americans) is wrong, the centre of attention soon shifted to reverse discrimination : is it acceptable to favour women and members of racial minority groups for jobs and enrollment in universities and colleges because they have been discriminated against in the past? ( See affirmative action .)

Inequality between the sexes was another early focus of discussion. Does equality here mean ending as far as possible all differences in the sex roles, or could there be equal status for different roles? There was a lively debate—both between feminists and their opponents and, on a different level, between feminists themselves—about what a society without sexual inequality would be like. Feminist philosophers were also involved in debates about abortion and about new methods of reproduction. These topics will be covered separately below.

Until the late 20th century, most philosophical discussions of justice and equality were limited in scope to a single society. Even Rawls’s theory of justice, for example, had nothing to say about the distribution of wealth between societies, an issue that could have made acceptance of his maximin principle much more difficult. In the 1990s philosophers began to think about the moral implications of the vast inequality in wealth between the leading industrialized countries and the countries of the developing world, some of which were afflicted with widespread famine and disease. What obligations, if any, do the citizens of affluent countries have to those who are starving? In Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (1996), the American philosopher Peter Unger made a strong case for the view that any person of reasonable means who neglects to send money to organizations that work to reduce global poverty is thereby doing something very seriously wrong. The German-born philosopher Thomas Pogge, in World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (2002), argued that affluent countries are responsible for increasing the poverty of developing countries and thus for causing millions of deaths annually. In one of his late works, The Law of Peoples (1999), Rawls himself turned to the relations between societies, though his conclusions were more conservative than those of Unger and Pogge.

There is one issue related to equality in which philosophers have led, rather than followed, a social movement . In the early 1970s, a group of young Oxford-based philosophers began to question the assumption that the moral status of nonhuman animals is automatically inferior to that of humans—as well as the conclusion usually drawn from it, that it is morally permissible for humans to use nonhuman animals as food, even in circumstances where they could nourish themselves well and efficiently without doing so. The publication in 1972 of Animals, Men and Morals: An Inquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-humans , edited by Roslind and Stanley Godlovitch and John Harris, was followed three years later by Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation and then by a flood of articles and books that established the issue as a part of applied ethics. At the same time, these writings provided a philosophical basis for the animal rights movement, which had a considerable effect on attitudes and practices toward animals in many countries.

Most philosophical work on the issue of animal rights advocated radical changes in the ways in which humans treat animals. Some philosophers, however, defended the status quo, or at least something close to it. In The Animals Issue: Moral Theory in Practice (1992), the British philosopher Peter Carruthers argued that humans have moral obligations only to those beings who can participate in a hypothetical social contract . The obvious difficulty with such an approach is that it proves too much: if humanity has no obligations to animals, then it also has no obligations to the minority of humans with severe intellectual disabilities or to future generations of humans, since they too cannot reciprocate . Another British philosopher, Roger Scruton, supported both animal welfare and the right of humans to use animals, at least in circumstances that entailed some benefit to the animals in question. Thus, in Animal Rights and Wrongs (2000) he supported foxhunting, because it encourages humans to protect the habitat in which foxes live, but condemned modern “factory” farms, because they do not provide even a minimally acceptable life for the animals raised in them. ( See also animal rights ; vegetarianism .)

Environmental issues raise a host of difficult ethical questions, including the ancient question of the nature of intrinsic value. Whereas many philosophers in the past have agreed that human experiences have intrinsic value—and the utilitarians at least have always accepted that the pleasures and pains of nonhuman animals are of some intrinsic significance—this does not show why it is so bad if dodoes become extinct or a rainforest is cut down. Are these things to be regretted only because of the experiences that would be lost to humans or other sentient beings? Or is there more to it than that? From the late 20th century, some philosophers defended the view that trees, rivers, species (considered apart from the individual animals of which they consist), and perhaps even ecological systems as a whole have a value independent of the instrumental value they may have for humans or nonhuman animals. There is, however, no agreement on what the basis for this value should be.

Concern for the environment also raises the question of obligations to future generations . How much do human beings living now owe to those not yet born? For those who hold a social-contract ethics or for the ethical egoist, the answer would seem to be: nothing. Although humans existing in the present can benefit those existing in the future, the latter are unable to reciprocate. Most other ethical theories, however, do give some weight to the interests of future generations. Utilitarians would not think that the fact that members of future generations do not yet exist is any reason for giving less consideration to their interests than to the interests of present generations—provided that one can be certain that future generations will exist and will have interests that will be affected by what one does. In the case of, say, the storage of radioactive wastes or the emission of gases that contribute to climate change , it seems clear that what present generations do will indeed affect the interests of generations to come. Most philosophers agree that these are important moral issues. Climate change in particular has been conceived of as a question of global equity: how much of a scarce resource (the capacity of the atmosphere safely to absorb waste gases produced by human activity) may each country use? Are industrialized countries justified in using far more of this resource, on a per capita basis, than developing countries, considering that the human costs of climate change will fall more heavily on developing countries because they cannot afford the measures needed to mitigate them?

These questions become even more complex when one considers that the size of future generations can be affected by government population policies and by other less-formal attitudes toward population growth and family size. The notion of overpopulation conceals a philosophical issue that was ingeniously explored in Parfit ’s aforementioned Reasons and Persons . What is optimum population? Is it the population size at which the average level of welfare will be as high as possible? Or is it the size at which the total amount of welfare is as great as possible? There were decisive objections to the average view, but the total view also had counterintuitive consequences. The total view entails that a vastly overpopulated world, one in which the average level of welfare is so low as to make life barely worth living, is morally preferable to a less-populated world in which the average level of welfare is high, provided that the number of people in the overpopulated world is so great as to make the total amount of welfare in that world greater than in the less-populated world. Parfit referred to this implication as the “Repugnant Conclusion.” Much thought was given to finding alternatives that did not carry the counterintuitive consequences of the average and total views. But the alternatives suggested had their own difficulties, and the question remained one of the most baffling conundrums in applied ethics. ( See also environmentalism .)

The Vietnam War ensured that discussions of the justness of war and the legitimacy of conscription and civil disobedience were prominent in early writings in applied ethics. There was considerable support for civil disobedience against unjust aggression and against unjust laws even in a democracy .

With the end of conscription in the United States and of the war itself two years later (1975), philosophers turned their attention to the problem of nuclear weapons. One central question was whether the strategy of nuclear deterrence could be morally acceptable, given that it treats civilian populations as potential nuclear targets. In the 1990s the massacres of civilians in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda raised the issue mentioned above in connection with Mill: the right of one or more countries to intervene in the internal affairs of another country solely because it is engaged in crimes against its own citizens. This issue was taken up within discussions of broader questions dealing with human rights, including the question of whether the insistence that all countries respect human rights is an expression of a universal human value or merely a form of Western “cultural imperialism.”

Abortion , euthanasia , and the value of human life

A number of ethical questions are concerned with the endpoints of the human life span. The question of whether abortion or the use of human embryos as sources of stem cell s can be morally justified was exhaustively discussed in popular contexts , where the answer was often taken to depend directly on the answer to the further question: “When does human life begin?” Many philosophers argued that the latter question was the wrong one to ask, since no conclusion of a specifically moral character follows directly from the scientific fact that human life begins at conception or at some other time. A better approach, according to these philosophers, is to ask what it is that makes killing a human being wrong and then to consider whether these characteristics, whatever they might be, apply to the earliest stages of human life. Although there was no generally agreed-upon answer, some philosophers presented surprisingly strong arguments to the effect that not only the embryo and the fetus but even the newborn infant has no right to life. This position was defended by the British philosopher Jonathan Glover in Causing Death and Saving Lives (1977) and in more detail by the Canadian-born philosopher Michael Tooley in Abortion and Infanticide (1983).

Such views were hotly contested, especially by those who claimed that all human life, irrespective of its characteristics, is sacrosanct . The task for those who defended the sanctity of human life was to explain why human life, no matter what its characteristics, is specially worthy of protection. Explanation could no doubt be provided in terms of traditional Christian doctrines such as that all humans are made in the image of God or that all humans have an immortal soul. In the philosophical debate, however, opponents of abortion and embryo research eschewed religious arguments of this kind, though without finding a convincing secular alternative .

Somewhat similar issues were raised by the practice of euthanasia when it is nonvoluntary, as in the case of severely disabled newborn infants ( see below Bioethics ). Voluntary euthanasia, on the other hand, could be defended on the distinct ground that the state should not interfere with the free, informed choices of its citizens in matters that do not cause harm to others. (The same argument was often invoked in defense of the pro-choice position in the abortion controversy. But it was much weaker in this case, because it presupposed what it needed to prove: namely, that the fetus does not count as a person—or at least not as a person to the extent that the pregnant woman does.) Critics of voluntary euthanasia emphasized practical matters such as the difficulty of maintaining adequate safeguards; their chief objection was that the practice would lead via a “slippery slope” to nonvoluntary euthanasia and eventually to the compulsory involuntary killing of those the state considers socially undesirable. The open practice of voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands followed by its subsequent legalization there in 2001 provided an opportunity to test this claim. To date, studies of the rate of euthanasia in that country do not show any evidence of a slippery slope, but the absence of comparable studies in other countries means that the facts remain in dispute.

Applied Ethics

In book: Philosophy
Publisher: Oxford University Press

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The Oxford Handbook of Professional Service Firms

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6 Professional Ethics: Origins, Applications, and Developments

Hugh Gunz, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Sally Gunz is Professor of Business Law and Professional Ethics in the School of Accounting and Finance, University of Waterloo, Canada. Her primary research interests centre around the legal and ethical responsibilities of professionals and, increasingly, how professionals make ethical decisions, and what factors impact those decisions. She has studied professionals in both employed and private practice settings. She is the author of The New Corporate Counsel (Carswell: 1991) and several academic studies relating to in-house lawyers, lawyers in private practice, accountants and actuaries. She is a past-President of the Academy of Legal Studies in Business and the former director of the Centre for Accounting Ethics.

Ronit Dinovitzer is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, where she is cross appointed to the Institute for Management and Innovation. She is also a Faculty Fellow at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago, where she is Co-Director of the Research Group on Legal Diversity, and she is an Affiliated Faculty in Harvard’s Program on the Legal Profession. As a sociologist of the professions her research focuses on the social organization of lawyers, the role of labor markets, and the effects of culture on professional work. Recent projects include the “After the JD” study, the first national longitudinal study of law graduates in the US, the “Law and Beyond” Study, the first national study of law graduates in Canada, and a Canadian study on Ethics, the Professional Service Firm and Corporate Governance (with Hugh and Sally Gunz).

Published: 05 October 2015
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This chapter introduces professional ethics as a specific example of applied or practical ethics. The authors provide a short review of the literature on theoretical and applied ethics in order to give context for the subsequent discussion. They examine three foundational concepts of professional ethics: codes adopted by professional bodies, professional autonomy, and the contested role of gatekeeper. Next, the authors consider ethical pressures experienced by professionals in the non-professional organization (NPO), and then the Professional Service Firm (PSF). Here the authors compare the pressure exerted by employer and clients and examine how so-called “client capture” can become a complex phenomenon when both client and professional are corporate entities. Finally, the chapter considers the challenges for the study of ethics in the PSF highlighted by this account.

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Essay on Ethics for Students and Children

500+ words essay on ethics.

Essay on Ethics – Ethics refers to the concepts of right and wrong conduct. Furthermore, ethics is basically a branch of philosophy dealing with the issue of morality. Moreover, ethics consist of the rules of behavior. It certainly defines how a person should behave in specific situations. The origin of ethics is old and it started from the Stone Age . Most noteworthy, over the centuries many religions and philosophers have made contributions to ethics.

Branches of Ethics

First of all, comes the descriptive branch of ethics. Descriptive ethics involve what people actually believe to be right or wrong. On the basis of this, the law decides whether certain human actions are acceptable or not. Most noteworthy, the moral principles of society keep changing from time to time. Therefore, descriptive ethics are also known as comparative ethics. This is because; it compares the ethics of past and present as well as ethics of one society and another.

Normative ethics is another important branch of ethics. Moreover, Normative ethics deals with certain norms or set of considerations. Furthermore, these norms or set of considerations dictate how one should act. Therefore, normative ethics sets out the rightness or wrongness of actions or behaviours. Another name for normative ethics is prescriptive ethics. This is because; it has principles which determine whether an action is right or wrong.

Meta-ethics consists of the origin of the ethical concepts themselves. Meta-ethics is not concerned whether an action is good or evil. Rather, meta-ethics questions what morality itself is. Therefore, meta-ethics questions the very essence of goodness or rightness. Most noteworthy, it is a highly abstract way of analyzing ethics.

Applied ethics involves philosophical examination or certain private and public life issues. Furthermore, this examination of issues takes place from a moral standpoint. Moreover, this branch of ethics is very essential for professionals. Also, these professionals belong to different walks of life and include doctors , teachers , administrators, rulers.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Applications of Ethics

Bioethicists deal with the ethical questions that arise in the relationships among life sciences, biotechnology, medicine, politics, and philosophy. Furthermore, Bioethics refers to the study of controversial ethics brought about by advances in biology and medicine .

Ethics also have a significant application in business. Moreover, business ethics examines ethical principles in relation to a business environment.

Military ethics involve the questions regarding the application of ethos of the soldier. Furthermore, military ethics involves the laws of war. Moreover, it also includes the question of justification of initiating military force.

Public sector ethics deals with a set of principles that guide public officials in their service. Furthermore, the public sector involves the morality of decision making. Most noteworthy, it consists of the question of what best serves the public’s interests.

In conclusion, ethics is certainly one of the most important requirements of humanity. Furthermore, without ethics, the world would have been an evil and chaotic place. Also, the advancement of humanity is not possible without ethics. There must be widespread awareness of ethics among the youth of society.

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Home — Essay Samples — Philosophy — Ethics — The Importance of Virtue Ethics

The Importance of Virtue Ethics

Categories: Ethics

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Published: Mar 20, 2024

Words: 656 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Personal development, professional conduct, societal well-being.

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http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4609-9179 Melanie Jansen 1 , 2 ,
Peter Ellerton 3
1 Paediatric Intensive Care Unit & Centre for Children’s Health Ethics and Law , Children’s Health Queensland Hospital and Health Service , South Brisbane , Queensland , Australia
2 Faculty of Medicine , University of Queensland , Herston , Queensland , Australia
3 Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences , University of Queensland , Brisbane , Queensland , Australia
Correspondence to Dr Melanie Jansen, Paediatric Intensive Care Unit & Centre for Children’s Health Ethics and Law, Children’s Health Queensland Hospital and Health Service, Brisbane, QLD 4101, Australia; doctormjansen{at}gmail.com

In recent decades, evidence-based medicine has become one of the foundations of clinical practice, making it necessary that healthcare practitioners develop keen critical appraisal skills for scientific papers. Worksheets to guide clinicians through this critical appraisal are often used in journal clubs, a key part of continuing medical education. A similar need is arising for health professionals to develop skills in the critical appraisal of medical ethics papers. Medicine is increasingly ethically complex, and there is a growing medical ethics literature that modern practitioners need to be able to use in their practice. In addition, clinical ethics services are commonplace in healthcare institutions, and the lion’s share of the work done by these services is done by clinicians in addition to their usual roles. Education to support this work is important. In this paper, we present a worksheet designed to help busy healthcare practitioners critically appraise ethics papers relevant to clinical practice. In the first section, we explain what is different about ethics papers. We then describe how to work through the steps in our critical appraisal worksheet: identifying the point at issue; scrutinising definitions; dissecting the arguments presented; considering counterarguments; and finally deciding on relevance. Working through this reflective worksheet will help healthcare practitioners to use the ethics literature effectively in clinical practice. We also intend it to be a shared evaluative tool that can form the basis of professional discussion such as at ethics journal clubs. Practising these critical reasoning skills will also increase practitioners’ capacity to think through difficult ethical decisions in daily clinical practice.

clinical ethics
education for health care professionals

This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ .

https://doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2018-104997

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Evidence-based medicine is a foundation of clinical practice, necessitating that healthcare practitioners develop keen critical appraisal skills for scientific papers. Many excellent resources exist, including the paper by Sackett et al 1 and a reference book by Greenhalgh. 2 In 1992, the Medical Journal of Australia published a paper titled ‘How to read a journal article’ . 3 The authors’ goal was to give a step-by-step guide to critically appraising scientific papers. Journal clubs using this worksheet, or similar, are now commonplace in teaching hospitals and are a key part of medical education. A similar need is arising for health professionals to develop skills in the critical appraisal of ethics papers. The reasons for this are twofold. First, healthcare grows increasingly ethically complex. Just as clinicians must keep abreast of the scientific literature, they should also keep up to date with the ethics literature relevant to their practice. Second, clinical ethics services (CES) have become commonplace in hospitals in developed nations. The lion’s share of the work of these services is done by healthcare professionals in addition to their clinical roles 4–6 and who have highly variable levels of training. 4–8 There is an urgent need to equip these and other clinical staff with skills to appraise papers relevant to these aspects of practice.

In this paper, we present the critical appraisal worksheet developed at the Centre for Children’s Health Ethics and Law (CCHEL), Children’s Health Queensland, Brisbane, Australia ( table 1 ). The worksheet was developed for our ethics journal club and has proved useful both for the critical appraisal of ethics papers and for the development of critical thinking skills that can be applied in clinical practice and in clinical ethics consultation work. The goal of this paper is to provide a tool for clinicians without extensive philosophical training to critically appraise ethics papers relevant to clinical practice. We also intend it to be a shared evaluative tool that can form the basis of professional discussion such as at ethics journal clubs. In the first section, we explain what is different about ethics papers. We then describe the steps in our critical appraisal worksheet.

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Ethics critical appraisal worksheet

What is different about ethics papers? A discussion of arguments, facts and values

It is important to recognise that ethics is a philosophical, not a scientific, discipline. Healthcare professionals are accustomed to critically appraising scientific data, and to constructing an argument based on that data for why a particular clinical decision is justified. Note that we use the word argument in the philosophical sense, meaning a set of reasons that justify a position. For example, if a patient presents with clinical signs consistent with bacterial pneumonia, the doctor will prescribe an antibiotic regimen based on their knowledge of the likely pathogens and the efficacy of particular antibiotics against these. That oral amoxicillin is an effective treatment for mild community-acquired pneumonia is a factual claim supported by scientific evidence. In contrast, ethical claims are claims of value and must be justified with an ethical argument. For example, the claim that life-sustaining therapy (LST) should be withdrawn from a patient with end-stage cancer is a value claim. Prescriptive words such as ‘should’ and ‘ought’ are useful signposts for value claims. An argument that may justify the claim that LST should be withdrawn is that the patient had previously stated that they did not want to be maintained on LST, and therefore to respect their autonomy the treatment should be withdrawn.

Note that matters of fact and matters of value coexist in clinical medicine (as they do in life) and that rationales for ethical and medical decisions are usually made up of both fact and value claims. Take the example just given of the argument that therapy should be stopped to respect the patient’s autonomy. That the patient had previously expressed wishes not to be maintained on life support is a factual claim. The claim that we should respect autonomy is a value claim. Likewise, when deciding on antibiotics for the patient with pneumonia, the claim that amoxicillin is effective is a factual claim. That we should treat the patient with amoxicillin is a value claim—the implicit argument for which is that the right thing to do is to treat patients with the most effective therapy for their disease. This seems so plainly reasonable that it does not need to be stated; however, it is important to recognise implicit value judgements in clinical decisions, as these are often at issue when there is conflict. The important skill is to be able to differentiate fact and value claims and to understand how the two can interact to form a set of reasons that support a particular conclusion. To do this, it is important to understand how arguments are constructed.

Understanding arguments is important for clinical practice, because ethical decision making threads through everything healthcare practitioners do. High-level skills in this area are especially important for those providing clinical ethics consultation. The UK Clinical Ethics Network and the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities have each published core competencies for clinical ethics consultation. 9 10 Both specify the need for consultants to understand ethical theory and reasoning, to analyse ethical conflicts, and to be able to elicit values and assumptions. Understanding argumentation is fundamental to these skills. The ethics critical appraisal worksheet provides a framework through which to appraise arguments and, by guiding practitioners to read ethics papers actively, aims to deepen understanding of ethical argumentation. We acknowledge that there is a growing literature in empirical ethics—this critical appraisal worksheet is not intended for these papers, as they are scientific papers and can be appraised as such. This worksheet is intended for papers that discuss ethical issues, not those that present scientific data relevant to an ethical issue.

The ethics critical appraisal worksheet

We have structured the worksheet in a similar way to the one by Darzins et al , 3 as a matrix of questions arranged in three columns ( table 1 ). In the first column are questions that prompt the reader to look for important types of information in the article. The second column contains questions that help the reader to decide whether there are problems with these. The third column poses questions to help the reader decide if any problems identified threaten the quality of the paper. Using this worksheet should assist clinicians to more rapidly identify problems with the paper, making the reading of ethics papers more time-efficient.

Critical appraisal questions

What is the point at issue.

The point at issue is the ethical question that the paper is addressing. Well-written ethics papers will explicitly state the point, or points, at issue in the introduction and will go on to address them. Poorly written ethics papers will shift between points at issue, which clouds reasoning and precludes systematic appraisal of all the relevant arguments. Shifting the point at issue happens often in ethical discussions. For example, we may be discussing the issue of whether we should continue providing LST to a child with a very poor prognosis. One person believes that the LST is causing suffering to the child, another person questions the truth of this. A third person points out that we cannot over-ride the parents’ autonomy. This third person is shifting the point at issue. The ethicality of over-riding parental autonomy is important, but concerns a different point at issue. Whether the LST is causing suffering or not is a point that needs to be explored and clarified before moving onto the question of whether it is of a magnitude that makes it reasonable to interfere with parental autonomy.

Has the author defined all of the terms they use?

Defining key terms is critical to avoid confusion. For example, in a paper discussing the rights of adolescents to autonomy in medical decision making, the author needs to define what persons they are referring to with the word ‘adolescent’; exactly what range of decisions they are referring to within the phrase ‘medical decision making’; and exactly how autonomy is conceived in this context. Failing to define key terms used in an argument sacrifices clarity, and defining key terms in an unusual or unreasonable way may have implications for the generalisability of the argument.

Dissect the argument: What are the premises of the author’s argument? What is/are the author’s conclusion/s?

This section of the worksheet requires explanation of the anatomy of an argument and clarification of the difference between truth and validity.

Arguments consist of premises and a conclusion, for example:

Premise 1: Human suffering is undesirable.

Premise 2: Medically extending life in case X prolongs human suffering.

Conclusion: Medically extending life in case X is undesirable.

This is a valid argument because the conclusion follows logically from the premises; that is, it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false. Whether the conclusion (or a premise) is true or not is a separate issue. Refuting this argument requires proving one or both of the premises to be false—finding evidence that suffering is not always undesirable, or making a case that this particular medical intervention does not prolong suffering. There are no errors of reasoning in this argument, but there may be factual errors which will prove the argument to be a bad one. Consider another argument:

Premise 1: Lucy has a chronic cough.

Premise 2: Lung cancer can present with a chronic cough.

Conclusion: Lucy has lung cancer.

In this case, the argument is invalid. The premises are true but the reasoning is flawed. It is true that Lucy has a chronic cough, and that lung cancer can present with a chronic cough, but it does not follow that Lucy necessarily has lung cancer. Her chronic cough may be from asthma or chronic bronchitis. Lucy may even have lung cancer, although it could be of a type that would not usually cause coughing. So, even if all the information given is true, the conclusion that she must have lung cancer does not necessarily follow.

Another important phenomenon to be aware of is the ‘hidden assumption’. A hidden assumption is a premise that is not explicitly stated. For example, a person may claim that homosexuality is morally wrong because it is unnatural. The hidden premise here is that things that are unnatural are morally wrong, as follows:

Premise 1: (Hidden) Things that are unnatural are morally wrong.

Premise 2: Homosexuality is unnatural.

Conclusion: Homosexuality is morally wrong.

To refute this argument one needs to either show the premises are false or that the reasoning is invalid. The reasoning is valid because it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false. However, even if one were to accept premise 2—in ignorance of the natural occurrence of homosexuality in many animals—the hidden premise 1 ignores that many things that are unnatural are considered morally good (or at least morally neutral), such as medicines, clothing or the telephone. Identifying the hidden premise is necessary to fully represent the argument, and hence to properly evaluate it.

In ethics papers, deciding whether premises are true will often require recourse to the scientific literature. Good ethics papers have well-researched references for factual premises. Appraising the validity of reasoning can be more difficult and requires practice. A full and rich account of logical fallacies is outside the scope of this paper; however, there are excellent, accessible resources available to hone these skills. 11 It is also worth noting that the overall position of an ethics paper is likely to be made up of a complex argument, with the conclusions of initial arguments making up the premises of further arguments. For example, some may claim that premise 1 (above) is a claim about the existence of ethical laws of nature. To support this claim, the person must develop an argument for the existence of ethical laws of nature and the definition of ‘unnatural’, ending with premise 1—things that are unnatural are morally wrong—as the conclusion. The analytical framework we present here is applicable to each constituent argument of a complex argument.

Does the author address all relevant counterarguments?

When making a case for an ethical position, it is imperative that authors address counterarguments to their position. If an author has not addressed relevant counterarguments, or has done so unconvincingly, this significantly decreases the strength of their case, or at least suggests a shallow investigation of the issue.

Is the argument or exploration of the issue relevant to your practice?

Some ethics papers will address a specific ethical question arising in the reader’s own practice and assist them in navigating this scenario. Other papers will change the way practitioners think, affecting practice in myriad but subtle ways. There will be papers that, while of good internal quality, are not relevant to the reader’s practice. Explicitly deciding on the relevance of a paper prompts practitioners to contextualise new ethical information within their own practice.

Working through this reflective worksheet will aid healthcare practitioners in actively reading and critically appraising ethics papers, enabling them to use the ethics literature more effectively. Developing these critical reasoning skills will also increase capacity to think through difficult ethical decisions in day-to-day practice. It is of particular importance that clinicians working within CES develop these skills to a high level. In the future, we hope to empirically evaluate the ethics critical appraisal worksheet.

Key messages

Healthcare is increasingly ethically complex, and so there is a growing need for clinicians to keep up to date with the ethics literature relevant to clinical practice.

Clinical ethics services have become commonplace, and the majority of the work of these services is done by clinicians in addition to their clinical roles.

Ethics papers differ in important ways from scientific papers, requiring a different set of critical appraisal skills.

We have developed a worksheet to assist clinicians in the critical appraisal of ethics papers, which can also be used as a shared evaluative tool, such as at ethics journal clubs.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge all CCHEL Clinical Ethics Response Pool members who have participated in the ethics journal club, and in so doing have helped to refine this critical appraisal worksheet.

Sackett DL ,
Rosenberg WM ,
Gray JA , et al
Greenhalgh T
Darzins PJ ,
Pearlman RA
Slowther AM ,
McClimans L ,
Irving H , et al
Godkin MD ,
Upshur RE , et al
Kesselheim JC ,
Johnson J ,
Larcher V ,
Richardson J ,
Meaden S , et al

Contributors MJ conceived the idea of the critical appraisal worksheet for clinicians. PE assisted in developing the idea and refining the worksheet. MJ wrote the initial draft of the manuscript. PE and MJ were both involved in draft review and development of the final version of the manuscript. MJ is the guarantor of this article.

Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Disclaimer The views expressed in this paper are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect the views of their institutions.

Competing interests None declared.

Patient consent Not required.

Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

Data sharing statement No additional data are available.

Author note MJ is a medical doctor in intensive care medicine and has additional qualifications and experience in clinical ethics. She co-led the working group to establish the Centre for Children’s Health Ethics and Law at Children’s Health Queensland, and was the centre’s inaugural Clinical Ethics Fellow. MJ recently completed a Churchill Fellowship in clinical ethics. She has published both empirical research and analysis pieces on healthcare ethics issues. PE is a science educator and philosopher, and is the Curriculum Director of the University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project. He is an expert in critical thinking and argumentation and has published on these topics in a number of contexts.

Correction notice This article has been made Open Access since it was published Online First.

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What is different about ethics papers? A discussion of arguments, facts and values

The ethics critical appraisal worksheet

Critical appraisal questions

Has the author defined all of the terms they use?

Dissect the argument: What are the premises of the author’s argument? What is/are the author’s conclusion/s?

Does the author address all relevant counterarguments?

Is the argument or exploration of the issue relevant to your practice?

Key messages