Applied Ethics

This is Unit Eight of Ethics and Values: Applied Ethics. Seven units built the instruments. This one takes them outdoors, onto disputes that are unsettled right now, in courtrooms and clinics and legislatures. Two rules govern all of it. Every case opens by separating what people disagree about factually from where their values actually part. And every position gets stated in the form its own defenders would recognise — a weak version proves nothing when it falls. Then six disputes: dying, distant poverty, unjust law, punishment, war, and decisions handed to machines. The unit ends with a method and a case that puts the method under a clock. By the end you will be able to do five things. One: open any applied dispute the way this unit does — sort the factual quarrel from the values line, and argue each side at full strength. Two: lay out the euthanasia debate, its four kinds and the strongest argument on each side. Three: state Singer's rescue principle and the two replies that bound it. Four: state King's test for an unjust law, his four-step discipline, and why "it's the law" answers nothing. Five: file a case on punishment or on an automated decision, using the innocence constraint and the reasons requirement.

Before any dispute, two rules. The first sorts the quarrel: some of what people are fighting about is a question of fact, and the rest is where their values genuinely part. Argue the second while the first is still in play and nobody moves. The second rule concerns who you are arguing against.

The first move, every time.

Ethics 341 The Applied Turn

Before arguing about a mask mandate, split it: how far the virus travels is answered by evidence, and what liberty may be asked to pay for safety is where the disagreement actually lives.

And the rule of engagement.

Ethics 342 The Strongest-Version Rule

Beating your neighbour's laziest sentence wins the porch and settles nothing. Each position here gets stated by someone who holds it, in the version they would defend.

The first dispute is dying. Nothing useful gets said until the kinds are sorted, because two axes cross here — whether the patient asked, and whether death is brought about or merely not delayed. Then the two arguments in favour, which pull from different directions.

Sort the kinds first.

Ethics 345 Euthanasia: The Kinds

Refusing another round of treatment in writing sits in one box. A requested lethal dose sits in another. The whole dispute lives in the space between those boxes.

The first argument for.

Ethics 346 The Argument from Mercy

Its engine is a question: name what those last weeks of agony bought, and name who received it. When no answer arrives, the argument presses hard.

The second comes from self-rule.

Ethics 347 The Argument from Autonomy

Put publicly: a government with no authority over your work or your faith has no better claim over your ending. Dying is part of the life the person was living.

Three arguments on the other side, and the third is the interesting one, because it attacks a distinction both camps had been leaning on: that there is a moral difference between causing a death and allowing one.

The first argument against.

Ethics 348 The Sanctity Argument

Its root runs through natural law and divine command alike. If a life is held in trust rather than owned, then trustees have no power to liquidate it — and consent cannot supply what the trustee lacks.

The second looks downstream.

Ethics 349 The Slippery-Slope Argument

The worry is not tonight's patient. It is a budget meeting a decade out, and what the permission has turned into once hospitals, insurers, and exhausted staff are the ones administering it.

The third attacks a distinction both sides use.

Ethics 350 The Bare-Difference Argument

One uncle drowns the nephew; the other stands and watches him drown. Nothing about standing still redeemed the second man — and that, precisely, was the point being made.

The second dispute produces the most demanding argument in the course. It starts with a case nobody disputes and reaches a conclusion almost nobody lives by. Two replies mark out where reasonable people get off, and Rawls supplies a third way of thinking about the same gap.

Start where everyone agrees.

Ethics 355 The Drowning Child

Ruined shoes against a drowning child is not a close call. Singer's move is to ask what distance changed — and then to point out that the concert budget could have cured a stranger's blinding infection.

The principle behind the case.

Ethics 356 The Rescue Principle

Where you can stop something bad without giving up anything of similar weight, you are obliged to. Stated that plainly, it converts comfort into duty, and oceans do not weaken it.

The first reply.

Ethics 357 The Demandingness Reply

The violinist practising six hours a day is not on strike against human suffering, and a morality anyone can actually live inside has to be able to say so out loud.

The second reply moves the ground.

Ethics 358 The Entitlement Reply

Giving may be admirable, but earnings justly held belong to the earner. The line drawn here is between what is generous and what is owed — and that gap is the entire quarrel.

And Rawls on the same gap.

Ethics 359 The Difference Principle

Behind the veil, nobody designs a bottom rung they might land on. Differences in wealth survive that choice only if the worst-off position is better for their existing.

The third dispute asks what a person may do about a law that is genuinely wrong. It has a premise the country supplied itself, a test for telling just law from unjust, a defence that answers nothing, a discipline that earns the right to escalate, and one objection nobody should wave away.

The premise the argument opens from.

Ethics 364 The Equality Premise

Jefferson's sentence outran the men who signed it. Every movement since has read that promise back to the country that put it in writing, and asked it to mean what it said.

King's test.

Ethics 365 Just and Unjust Laws

A statute written by people it exempts, and enforced on people who had no voice in it, fails on both counts at once — harmony with the moral law, and sameness of application.

The defence that answers nothing.

Ethics 366 The Legality Defense

Every unjust statute in history was, at the time, perfectly legal. A sentence that would have defended all of them defends nothing in particular now.

The discipline that earns escalation.

Ethics 367 The Four Steps

Gather facts, negotiate, prepare yourself, then act. The order is the argument's armour: a campaign that skipped ahead cannot answer why it never tried the earlier steps.

And the objection worth taking seriously.

Ethics 368 The Rule-of-Law Objection

King granted the weight of it. Break only the unjust law, do it in the open, accept the penalty — disobedience shaped that way is reverence for law, aimed at repairing it.

The fourth dispute begins with a question that sounds naive and is not: lock a neighbour in your basement for stealing and you are the criminal. When the state does it, the verdict flips. Three answers explain why, and one test decides between them.

The question itself.

Ethics 373 The Question of Punishment

What the state does to the convicted would be a crime coming from anyone else. That difference wants a justification, and habit is not one.

The first answer looks forward.

Ethics 374 The Deterrence Case

Sentences get priced like guardrails on a mountain road: high enough to turn the next driver, and no higher than public safety actually requires.

The second looks back.

Ethics 375 The Desert Case

Kant's inheritance: punish because the act earned it, or concede the sentence is using the person to produce something. This answer consults the past and nothing else.

The third aims at repair.

Ethics 376 The Rehabilitation Ideal

A sentence built around literacy and treatment reads nothing like time served. The worry arrives alongside it: improvement imposed on someone is paternalism with a warden attached.

And the test all three must pass.

Ethics 377 The Innocence Constraint

Ask each theory what is wrong with convicting someone known to be innocent. Desert answers on the spot. Deterrence has to run the numbers first, and that hesitation is the whole objection.

The fifth dispute is the hardest, and the three positions on it disagree about something more basic than tactics: they disagree about whether moral judgment applies to war at all.

The first position.

Ethics 381 Pacifism

Its strength is the record — what wars have actually cost, every time. Its standing challenge is the neighbour whose country is being invaded, asking what she is supposed to do now.

The second, at the gate.

Ethics 382 Just War: Going to War

The list is joined by "and" on purpose. A cause that is genuinely just, pursued too early, too hopelessly, or by people with no standing to pursue it, still fails at the gate.

And inside the war.

Ethics 383 Just War: Fighting Justly

The oldest line in the doctrine: the soldier is the soldier's problem, and the village is never the objective, no matter what the objective costs to reach.

The third position denies the question.

Ethics 384 Realism About War

What this view has to survive: soldiers, courts, and whole publics go on making moral judgments about wars. Calling an atrocity an atrocity is not a category mistake.

The sixth dispute is where the humanity formulation from Unit Five went to work. Three ideas: what turns an intervention into treatment, why research needs a line drawn around it, and the point where care starts running someone's life for them.

What makes permission real.

Ethics 389 Informed Consent

A signature collected at midnight from a sedated patient has the paperwork and none of the substance. Those four conditions are not evidence of consent — they are what consent is.

The line research must not cross.

Ethics 390 Research and the Mere-Means Line

The protocols exist because the line was crossed before. Every review board is an institution assembled out of a remembered wrong, one case at a time.

And where care becomes control.

Ethics 391 Paternalism

Seatbelt laws, medication lockouts, a bartender refusing the next drink: each argues care, and each gets met with autonomy's question about whose life is being run.

The last dispute is the newest, and the striking thing is that the course's earliest tools catch all three problems. Nothing here needs a new ethics — it needs the ones you already have, pointed at systems that were not built to answer questions.

The first problem.

Ethics 396 The Responsibility Gap

A screening model rejects a qualified nurse. The vendor points at the training data, the hospital points at the vendor, the model says nothing at all. Someone still owes an answer.

The second is Unit One's test, at scale.

Ethics 397 Algorithmic Fairness

Delete the forbidden column and the postcode carries it straight back in. The consistency requirement never cared whether the special pleading was done by hand.

The third owes a reason.

Ethics 398 The Opacity Problem

A loan refusal that explains itself that way fails the standard Unit One set for every person making a claim. Decisions that shape lives owe reasons.

Five moves that turn any live dispute into an argument a stranger can follow — and the flagging in move two is what keeps the whole thing honest, because an estimate presented as a fact quietly wins arguments it never earned.

Watch it run on a facial-recognition contract.

Ethics 402 Running a Case File

Fix what nobody disputes. Flag what is disputed, out loud. List everyone affected and what each stands to lose. Run both sides at their strongest. Then show the reader exactly where the values part.

One ventilator, two patients, minutes to decide. A young traveller likely to recover, and an elderly local doctor with worse odds. Every instrument the course has issued, under a clock.

The capstone. The whole unit, under time pressure.

Ethics 406 The Last Ventilator

Undisputed: one machine, two patients, minutes. Disputed and flagged aloud: survival odds are estimates and must be entered as estimates. Affected: two patients, two families, and the staff who have to live with it.

Five things you can now do. You can open an applied dispute the way this unit does — separate the factual quarrel from the values line, and give every position its strongest form. You can lay out the euthanasia debate: the kinds sorted by consent and by means, mercy and autonomy on one side, sanctity and the slope on the other, and the two uncles aimed at the distinction underneath all of it. You can state the rescue principle — prevent the bad where the cost is not comparable — and the two replies: a life needs room in it, and there is a difference between what is generous and what is owed. You can test a law the way King tested one, name why legality is not a justification, and give the four steps in order. And you can file a case: fix the facts, flag the estimates, list the affected, run both sides at strength, and show the reader where the values part.