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The History and Revival of Applied Ethics

Philosophy in Europe from earliest times always used to be applied to practical issues such as medicine, conduct in war and sexual relations. You will find here a thumb-nail sketch of applied philosophy from Plato and before to Mill and later philosophers, and then an outline of factors that diverted philosophers in the anglophone world in the early twentieth century from practical matters to being preoccupied with the study of concepts alone (so-called 'second-order' issues).

Next, you will discover some factors and pressures that restored applied philosophy, including issues surrounding the Vietnam War and also the disclosures of Rachel Carson about how modern technology (in the forms of herbicides and pesticides) was exercising global rather than just local impacts, and unintended ones at that, thereby threatening ecosystems worldwide (Carson, Silent Spring, 1962). The work of leading figures of the early stages in the revival of applied or practical philosophy will be reviewed, including the universal prescriptivism of Richard Hare (Freedom and Reason, 1963), and the social contract model of John Rawls (A Theory of Justice, 1972), together with the limitations of both these approaches. There is no single pathway or methodology for conducting the study of applied ethics, as subsequent chapters will bear out.

Readers eager to move forward to ethical theories, rather than the history of applied ethics, may choose to turn to Chapter 2, while those preferring to leap into one of the particular fields of applied ethics without delay could turn to Chapter 3 (on inter-generational ethics) or to one of the subsequent chapters.

Applied Ethics has a Long History

For some five decades, many ethicists have studied the practical implications of ethics in an increasingly wide range of fields. These have ranged from the ethics of war to the ethics of sex, from medical ethics to environmental ethics, and from ethical implications of historical slavery to the ethics of plans for the lives of future people. The treatment of animals has been a prominent concern, together with related issues such as those surrounding vegetarianism and veganism. So too have the ethics of sustainable development and of the remediation of poverty.

Yet, as recently as the 1960s, these issues had little or no place in the philosophy curriculum of universities, at least in anglophone countries and countries influenced by them. Philosophy was understood to focus on the clarification of concepts and on the logical relations between them, and not on the practical issues to which they applied. It was widely agreed that philosophy was not a first-order discipline, concerned with what we, as individuals, or society, or our governments should do. Instead it was held to be a second-order subject, concerned to analyse the ideas that others could go on to use in practical contexts. One journal, founded towards the close of this period in Nigeria, was actually called Second Order (1972-1988), although there was always some tension between this title and the journal's subtitle, An African Journal of Philosophy.

All the same, from the philosophers of ancient Greece to those of the late Victorian period (or in other words up to 1900), philosophy had continually been applied to practical issues, and also to fundamental scientific ones. For example, Plato (428-348 bce) discussed in his Republic the nature of an ideal state and society, including its class structure and relations between the sexes. Earlier still, the Sicilian Greek philosopher Empedocles (490-430 bce), originator of the four elements theory of earth, air, fire and water, also devised a rudimentary theory of evolution; much later, Charles Darwin acknowledged him as a predecessor (Burrow 1985, 53). More relevant to ethics was a book he probably wrote under the title Purifications, about the right sort of dietary and other practices to secure the favour of the gods, vegetarianism included (Kingsley and Parry 2020).

Plato's great successor, Aristotle (384-322 bce), wrote works that reasoned from ordinary language in a way that ideally suited many of the anglophone philosophers of 1900-1970, including his three studies of ethics. These works, like those of Plato, continue to reward those who study them. However, he also invented the discipline of biology, writing books with titles such as The Parts of Animals, and at the same time a series of books on political constitutions, such as The Constitution of Athens. To come closer to (what we call) applied ethics, two of the ten books of his Nicomachean Ethics are a study of friends and friendship.

Later in the ancient world, the philosopher and theologian Augustine of Hippo (354-430 ce) discussed, among many other subjects, the ethics of war, and originated the theory of the just war (see Chapter 7 below). This was taken further by the philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) and, soon after Columbus' celebrated voyage to the Americas of 1492, by the Spanish philosopher Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484-1566), who argued that the principles of just-war theory applied equally to aboriginal Americans as to Europeans (Christian or otherwise).

This brings us to the Early Modern Period, when several philosophers attempted to devise new methods for the study both of society and of the natural world. Yet they saw no need to defend drawing people's attention to the social implications of their methods, for that is what the philosophers of the ancient and medieval worlds had always done. Thus Francis Bacon (1561-1626) introduced and defended the scientific method of induction, but also depicts in his New Atlantis (1624) a society that applied this method to enhance agriculture and overcome disease. His aim was 'the enlarging of the human empire, to the effecting of all things possible'. Such language has recently attracted much hostile critique (Merchant 1990 [1980]), but leaves no doubt about Bacon's commitment to applied ethics (Attfield 2006).

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Bacon's erstwhile secretary, in turn applied his very different philosophy to social issues. He attempted to articulate 'laws of nature', which rational individuals will all have reason to adopt on the basis of enlightened self-interest, and which form the basis of the social contract that (in his view) underlies society and of the legitimacy of (an authoritarian form of) government (Attfield 2006). His contemporary, the Jewish philosopher Spinoza (1632-1677), resident in what we call 'The Netherlands' (then the United Provinces), argued like Hobbes from first principles, but sought to defend a much more liberal form of society and of government that would recognize the importance of religious toleration (Nadler 2020).

Slightly later, John Locke (1632-1704) applied his belief in God-given rights both to political philosophy and the rights of citizens against the state (in his Treatises of Government), and also to religious toleration (in his Letter Concerning Toleration). Both these works were composed during his exile in the United Provinces (1683-1689); a great many philosophers of the time found scope to apply their ideas to controversial issues in the relative freedom of that country. Locke also contributed to the theory of education, expressing concern that children be taught the avoidance of cruelty to animals, but was reticent (given its contemporary growth) on the subject of slavery (Attfield 2006). His theories about private property facilitated the acquisition of land as property in the British colonies, and thus contributed to the (problematic) growth of industrial capitalism in the period after his death (Northcott 2013).

Across the period between 1650 and 1800 more than a dozen British philosophers wrote about the basis of ethics, seeking to counter the egoistic philosophy of Hobbes (his belief that all agents are motivated by self-interest), and offering a variety of different foundations. One of the most notable was the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688), an upholder of free will against Hobbesian determinism (the belief that there is only one future, exhaustively generated by laws of nature and earlier states of the universe). Several of these writers could be described as 'humanitarians' because, like Locke, they recognized the moral significance of animal as well as human suffering, and of preventing it, where it was avoidable. These included Christians such as Francis Hutcheson and sceptics such as David Hume. Hume also defended the permissibility of suicide (Raphael 1991; Attfield 2006).

Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism (1748-1832), applied his moral philosophy to the justification of punishment, a topic that remained an issue for analytic philosophers even in the mid-twentieth century when other topics in applied philosophy were considered unphilosophical. Utilitarians hold that right actions are actions or types of actions that promote the greatest available balance of happiness over unhappiness. (Many people misuse the term 'utilitarian', as if it meant 'instrumental' or 'instrumentalist'; please try to avoid such flagrant misuse of language.) John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) applied his version of liberal utilitarianism to representative government, to minority rights and to sexual equality; and Henry Sidgwick...