ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that when ethics and morality are rightly understood, the concept of applied ethics loses all application. 'Applied ethics', as that expression is now used, is a single rubric for a large range of different theoretical and practical activities. The central requirement of dominant conception of ethics is that rules of morality are such as any rational agent would agree to. Moral rules exist only in and through their range of applications and history of moral rules in key part is history of changes in their applications. Historical raises problems about their application are precisely those that provide modern applied ethics with its domain. In some areas the ideological function of the dominant conception of applied ethics masks transactions in which professional power and authority are being asserted in a way that protect professional autonomy from general moral scrutiny. Applied ethics is not only based upon a mistake, but upon one that has proved to be harmfully influential.
