ABSTRACT
The branch of ethics that is known as “applied ethics” has a number of challenges to face. One of the most difficult is what exactly is meant by “applied.”While there is a view that for ethics to be applied, there must be a theory to apply, there are opposing arguments supporting an anti-theory position. It is not part of our remit here, however, to examine the rival merits of these two views. If one does take the view that theory has a role to play, there still remain issues about how flexible existing theories are, at a time of rapid change. Here there are several different types of change that pose challenges for ethical theory, including scientific advance, global financial crisis and its effects on values, and threats to security in a post-9/11 world. In this chapter, however, we are concerned specifically with the challenge for ethical theory because of the very fact that issues now tend to arise on a global, rather than a local scale. How might ethical theory need to adapt to meet this challenge? Applied ethics has been most prominent in the field of biomedicine: medical ethics, nursing
ethics, bioethics and public health are all aspects of this. In this field, in particular, some academics have deployed theories such as utilitarianism and Kantianism, but another very influential approach has been that of the “mid-level principles” or “principlism” of Tom Beauchamp and James Childress: autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice (Beauchamp & Childress 2009). One of the advantages of these mid-level principles is that they can be grounded in different ethical theories. Autonomy, for example, can be supported by a Kantian or by a utilitarian theoretical position, although its role and justification will differ accordingly. The principles have been proposed as a focus around which agreement can be achieved, even across different cultures ( J. S. Gordon 2011). On the other hand, it has been argued that bioethics (along with the ethical theories here mentioned) is itself a Western phenomenon (Gbadagesin 2009), and that the principles of biomedical ethics do not travel well, that they reflect a Western, even an American perspective, in relation to the importance typically accorded to autonomy in particular (Holm 1995). This may be perceived as an overemphasis on the individual at the expense of such considerations as relatedness, community and solidarity, among others. Specifically, the requirement of informed consent, which is one practical form that can be taken by respect for autonomy, has been expected, arguably, to do too much ethical work in contexts for which it is ill-suited. A prominent example of this has been the reconsideration of informed consent in relation to
the development of population genomic research and biobanking, first nationally, and now internationally. It has become clear in this debate, at least, that ethics change, in time as well as
in space. The grand theories of Kantianism and utilitarianism, although both still influential today, were both products of an earlier age. Principlism was a twentieth-century development, but technological developments towards the end of the twentieth century required new input into our ethical thinking, as human beings confronted new ways of communicating and scientific developments made some ways of thinking no longer tenable. In the twenty-first century, the interdependence of societies around the globe is increasingly obvious, and is a major factor giving rise to global ethics as a distinct field of study, going beyond applied ethics to include insights from political philosophy.
