Abstract

There is some irony, and perhaps a bit of gallows humor, in opening a paper in this volume with the claim that “applied ethics” is a misnomer. Yet that claim is true in the following sense. What we need for most of the issues that have sparked the contemporary resurgence of moral and political theory is not the application of ethics as we know it, but the revamping of ethics to make it relevant to the issues we face. It is in our concern with major policy programs that ethics and political philosophy are most commonly rejoined to become a unified enquiry after a nearly complete separation through most of this century. Yet, ethical theories may be shaken to their foundations by our effort to apply them to policy problems. I do not propose to revamp ethics here, but only to show that much ethical theory cannot readily be applied to major policy problems. There are at least three important characteristics of major policy issues in general that may give traditional moral theories difficulties. First, such issues can generally be handled only by institutional intervention; they commonly cannot be resolved through uncoordinated individual action. Theories formulated at the individual level must therefore be recast to handle institutional actions and possibilities. Second, major policy issues typically have complicating strategic interactions between individuals at their bases. Third, they are inherently stochastic in the important sense that they affect large numbers with more or less determinable probabilities. C. H. Waddington calls such issues instances of “the problem of the ethics of stochastic processes.”