Robert Cavalier is Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University, and is affiliated with the Center for the Advancement of Applied Ethics on campus. He is a winner of the Elliott Dunlap Smith prize for Excellence in Teaching and is known for his work in ethics education and interactive multimedia. Professor Cavalier earned his Ph.D. from Duquesne University in 1978, and has been at Carnegie Mellon for 16 years. |
Chapter 17, selection: Applied Ethics in a
Digital Age The history of ethics in Western Philosophy begins auspiciously
with the interest of Socrates in matters pertaining to human affairs.
His questions about goodness and justice set into motion a narrative about
the methods of answering the practical questionWhat
ought I to do?that continues to this day. Part of any introductory
course in ethics will no doubt touch upon the main figures in this conversation,
covering Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Hume and Kant, Bentham,
Mill and others up to the turn of the 20th century. Once we reach G.E.
Moores Principia Ethica (1903), however, a change in approach to
the study of ethics in Anglo-American universities takes hold. The study
of ethics no longer focuses on the nature of moral character and the incentives
to be moral, nor has an interest in establishing a foundational normative
theory leading to policy- or action-guides. Moore argued that we first
need to clear up the meaning of our words and understand better the conceptual
scope and limits of the language of morals itself. This meta-ethical approach
to ethics is achieved through the analytic turn in ethics.
And this approach to ethics becomes the dominant approach for both scholars
and teachers throughout most of the 20th century. It is reflected in the
books and articles of the time, including textbooks containing excerpts
from ongoing debates in scholarly journals. During the 1960s and 1970s a change of direction again
occurs. The change is occasioned by, for instance, crises arising in Americas
hospital wards. An unexpected confluence of advances in medical technology
and a growing patients rights movement brought about cases in which
it was no longer clear whether keeping a terminally ill patient alive
through medical devices was really preserving the persons life or
prolonging the persons death. People of good will had sincere disagreements
over what ought to be done, and ethical guidance was sought. With the
establishment of the Hastings Center (1969) and Georgetowns Kennedy
Institute of Ethics (1971), the turn in applied ethics began, as professional
philosophers sought to address these concrete issues. But as these philosophers
soon discovered, applied ethics involves more than the straightforward
application of ethical theory. If meta-ethics is a reflection upon the
scope and limits of ethics itself (e.g., analyses of ethical relativism)
and if normative ethics seeks general theories that provide substantial
action guides (like the anthologized versions of Kants Categorical
Imperative or Benthams Principle of Utility), applied ethics focuses
on domain-specific areas like medicine, business, and engineering. Ethical
analyses in these domains require a level of detail not available to the
general theorist. |
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