“Applied ethics” has been the major growth area in North American philosophy in the last decade, yet a robust confidence and enthusiasm over its promise is far from universal in academic philosophy. It is considered nonphilosophical in West Germany, and has largely failed to penetrate British departments of philosophy. Whether it has any intellectually or pedagogically redeeming value is still widely debated in North America, where many who have tried to teach some area of applied ethics for the first time (...) have seen their courses grind to a halt in unresolvable quandaries, practical exigencies, or unavailable technical information. Consequently, some departments are at war over whether to hire or confer tenure on those who teach these subjects. Many also remain unconvinced that philosophical generalizations or theories can play any significant role in applied contexts. They may even doubt both that applied ethics is really ethics and that philosophy should accomodate this creature in its curriculum. (shrink)

In this engaging study, the authors put casuistry into its historical context, tracing the origin of moral reasoning in antiquity, its peak during the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, and its subsequent fall into disrepute from the mid-seventeenth century.

‘Applied ethics’, as that expression is now used, is a single rubric for a large range of different theoretical and practical activities. Such rubrics function partly as a protective device both within the academic community and outside it; a name of this kind suggests not just a discipline, but a particular type of discipline. In the case of ‘applied ethics’ the suggestive power of the name derives from a particular conception of the relationship of ethics to what goes on under (...) the rubric of ‘applied ethics’. Not everyone who conducts activities under that rubric owes allegiance to this conception and there are doubtless some who would repudiate it as strongly as I do. But it is that dominant conception from which most work in this area derives or aspires to derive its philosophical legitimacy. What is that conception? (shrink)

: An Aristotelian conception of practical ethics can be derived from the account of practical reasoning that Aristotle articulates in his Rhetoric and this has important implications for the way we understand the nature and limits of practical ethics. An important feature of this conception of practical ethics is its responsiveness to the complex ways in which agents form and maintain moral commitments, and this has important implications for the debate concerning methods of ethics in applied ethics. In particular, this (...) feature enables us to understand casuistry, narrative, and principlism as mutually supportive modes of moral inquiry, rather than divergent and mutually exclusive methods of ethics. As a result, an Aristotelian conception of practical ethics clears the conceptual common ground upon which practical ethicists can forge a stable and realistic self-understanding. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Principles of Biomedical Ethics. By Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress.

Both communitarianism and casuistry have sought to restore ethics as a practical science—the former by incorporating various traditions into a shared definition of the common good, the latter by considering the circumstances of each situation through critical reasoning. Mark G. Kuczewski analyzes the origins and methods of these two approaches and forges from them a new unified approach. This approach takes the communitarian notion of the person as its starting point but also relies upon the narrative and analogical tools of (...) case-based reasoning. He separates out the rhetoric that is incongruent with the Aristotelian aspirations of each method to show that the two are complementary, and that consensus can emerge from fragmentation. He then applies his resulting method to three major problems in bioethics: the difficulties that the issue of personal identity poses for advance directives, the role of the family in medical decision making, and the refusal of treatment because of religious beliefs. He analyzes the need to assume a communitarian notion of the person as a starting point for the application of casuistic insights. Combining theoretical, practical, and scholarly insights, this book will be of interest to philosophers, political and social scientists, and bioethicists. (shrink)

IN BOTH THE EUDEMIAN ETHICS AND THE NICOMACHEAN ETHICS, Aristotle says that the aim of ethical inquiry is a practical one; we want to know what virtue is so that we may become good ourselves and thereby do well and be happy. By classifying ethical inquiry as a practical endeavor, Aristotle is rejecting a view that he attributes to Socrates according to which ethics is a kind of theoretical science. In theoretical sciences, such as geometry or astronomy, the knowledge of (...) a particular subject matter is sought as an end in itself, and the possession of such knowledge is sufficient to make one a geometer or an astronomer. In rejecting this model Aristotle argues that the knowledge of virtue is sought not solely for itself but in order to inform praxis and in order that we become virtuous and good, not by knowing what the virtues are but by cultivating them in practice. (shrink)