Applied ethics is a branch of ethics, which in turn is a branch of philosophy.  Philosophy, etymologically,  is the love of wisdom.  It’s not the love of knowledge.  Anyone who has a lot of facts has knowledge.  Wisdom involves knowledge, but it involves much more: experience, good judgment, thoughtfulness, patience and understanding of people and the world.  If you had a serious personal problem and needed someone to confide in, you would seek a wise person, not a person with merely a lot of knowledge.

Ethics, as a branch of philosophy, can be understood as the love of wisdom with regard to the conduct of life. It is concerned with right and wrong, duty and obligation, good and bad.  Society deals with such notions in a formal way by enacting laws to regulate conduct.  But morality transcends law. It is a point of view that provides the ultimate guide to conduct.  Even laws need to be judged morally. What is legally permissible (as slavery once was in the US and the UK) can sometimes be morally wrong; and what is legally wrong (as expressing controversial political views once was – and still is in some countries) can be judged to be morally permissible.

Applied ethics is the quest for understanding with regard to the practical concerns of ethics: how to make sound choices and how best to resolve conflicts with others.   Every person encounters such problems. And every person who lives in advanced, technological societies like the US and the UK encounters especially complex problems of the sort dealt with in this text.  They are not the only problems people encounter, but because they are among the most difficult, trying to understand them is important to making one’s way wisely in a complex and often confusing world.

Normative ethics asks what the most basic principles and values are that everyone should acknowledge.  

Metaethics asks what the meanings of ethical terms are – such as good and bad, right and wrong – and whether there are any fixed principles for guiding conduct at all. Systematic attempts to answer such questions are by and large the specialized concerns of philosophers.

Applied ethics, by contrast, examines moral problems as encountered in experience by ordinary people rather than as viewed from pre-conceived normative or metaethical theories.  It is practical rather than theoretical. The quest for understanding in life is what leads one into normative ethics and metaethics, not the other way around. In this text, we shall seek to clarify problems such as racism, sexism, environmentalism and abortion as they are encountered in experience and bring in normative and metaethical theories only as relevant.  The aim is to help prepare you to answer the difficult questions raised by these problems.  In the end, you have to answer virtually all of the basic questions of ethics on your own. You can weigh what I and others say, but the final decisions rest with you. This doesn’t mean that whatever you decide is right.  That sort of naïve relativism is a metaethical theory which we don’t have space to critique. But if you reflect on issues as carefully as you can, and remain open to the possibility that even then you may have to reconsider your views in the light of experience, then you’ve done all that can be expected of you as a responsible moral person.