Applied and Professional Ethics

The development of applied ethics in recent decades has had great significance for philosophy and society. In this article, I try to characterise this field of philosophical inquiry. I also discuss the relation of applied ethics to social policy and to professional ethics. In the first part, I address the following questions: (1) What is applied ethics? (2) When and why did applied ethics appear? and (3) How do we engage in applied ethics? What are the methods? In the second part of the article, I introduce professional ethics. What is professional ethics, and how can one distinguish professional ethics from applied ethics? I argue that the moral content of professional ethics is a result of professional relations. I also argue that professional ethics best can be understood as a type of virtue ethics.