Applied Ethics, Overview

Applied ethics is a general field of study that includes all systematic efforts to understand and to resolve moral problems that arise in some domain of practical life, as with medicine, journalism, or business, or in connection with some general issues of social concern, such as employment equity or capital punishment. There are today three major subdivisions of applied ethics: biomedical ethics, concerned with ethical issues in medicine and biomedical research; business and professional ethics, concerned with issues arising in the context of business, including that of multinational corporations; and environmental ethics, concerned with our relations and obligations to future generations, to nonhuman animals and species, and to ecosystems and the biosphere as a whole.