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Articles

A Footnote On Casuistry

Mike Fuller asks whether applied ethics is possible.

Over the past decade, there has been a distinct shift of interest in moral philosophy from considering questions of ‘meta-ethics’ to considering questions of ‘applied ethics’. By ‘meta-ethics’ I mean any attempt at analysing ‘how ethics works’. Meta-ethics consists of classifying ethical theories in various ways (such as subjectivist or objectivist, cognitive or noncognitive, motivist or consequentialist, etc.) and of investigating the logical relations between them. It is also centrally concerned with the linguistic analysis of concepts such as ‘good’ and ‘right’, as in G.