As we saw in Chapter Four, the first half of the Twentieth Century was dominated by metaethics. During the last thirty years or so, however, there has been a gradual return to the mainstream of normative ethics, especially in the most recent branch of ethics, known as "applied ethics." "Applied ethics," as the term is currently being used, is a loose assortment of concrete, practical, but extremely thorny, moral issues of widespread, urgent social concern, in which moral philosophers have joined with scientists, clergy, journalists, politicians and the general public to formulate much needed policy decisions. Areas of greatest interest in applied ethics include "medical ethics," which is concerned with questions of abortion, euthanasia, the ethics of the doctor-patient relationship, and the allocation of scarce medical resources; "business ethics," which is concerned with questions of the responsibility of the business community to public safety and health standards, and the extent to which, if at all, the pursuit of profit legitimately excuses business leaders from the wider public morality of truth-telling, honesty and the like; "environmental ethics," which is concerned with issues of pollution, siting of toxic waste facilities, and acid rain; and a range of other areas such as war and peace, sex and love, and animal rights, in an ever expanding list of issues in applied ethics.

As the name implies, common to most areas of interest within applied ethics is an unusually difficult problem of application, applying moral principles to a specific situation or context. We have already noted in earlier chapters that the application of rules can never be mechanical but requires intelligence, skill and judgment. But the issues which have attracted sufficient public attention to be included within the area of applied ethics are ones in which, for a variety of reasons, it is unusually difficult to know how to apply moral principles, and therefore extremely difficult to arrive at satisfactory solutions.

In some cases application is difficult because new technologies have forced upon us new situations which we have never had to face before. Knowing what to do with nuclear waste is a good example of a problem of this sort. In the past we have developed social and ethical principles for dealing with waste disposal reasonably adequately in terms of health, convenience, aesthetic concerns, costs, and so on. But we have, as a society, never had to face the disposal of materials which are so dangerous, so immune to decay, and which can contaminate water resources over hundreds of square miles. Organ transplants is another example of this sort of problem of application that we will discuss later...