Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 26, No.

3, 2009
DOI number: 10.1111/j.1468-5930.2009.00446.x

Applied Ethics: Naturalism, Normativity and

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ONORA O’NEILL

abstract Normative argument is supposed to guide ways in which we might change the
world, rather than to fit the world as it is. This poses certain difficulties for the notion of applied
ethics. Taken literally the phrase ‘applied ethics’ suggests that principles or standards with
substantial philosophical justification, in particular ethical and political principles with such
justification, are applied to particular cases and guide action. However, the ‘cases’ which
applied ethics discusses are themselves indeterminate, and the relation of principles to these
‘cases’ differs from the relation of principles to cases in naturalistic, truth-oriented inquiry.
Writing in ‘applied ethics’, I shall argue, does not need elaborate case histories or scenarios,
since the testing points for normative principles are other normative principles rather than
particular cases. Normative principles and contexts to which they are applicable are indeed
needed for any reasoning that is practical, but they are not sufficient. Practical ethics needs
principles that can not merely be applied in certain cases or situations, but also enacted in
certain ways, and requires an account of practical judgement and of the public policies that
support that judgement.

1. Instruction and Edification

The term ‘applied philosophy’, as we all know, is relatively new, as is the term ‘applied
ethics’. What preceded them? Is the change only one of terminology? Have we moved
on in some definitive way beyond long traditions of didactic and instructive writing?
If so, just what has changed and how valuable is the change? I begin with a brief
reminder of some ways in which some of the tasks now taken to be important for
‘applied ethics’ were previously addressed.
Literature — in the broadest sense of term — has traditionally been seen as a proper
way in which to explore ethical and other practical issues with the aim of shaping
action and practice. Some sorts of literature are overtly instructive or didactic, but
often not particularly reflective: we may think of sermons and homilies, advice manuals
and casuistical work. Other literary works are reflective, but not overtly didactic. Works
of imaginative literature, in particular novels, have often had high practical and moral
ambitions. They are taken to offer both a reflective moral education and a critique of
major social and political issues (think of Dickens’ Hard Times, or Fontane’s Effie Briest
or E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India). Such writing can shape action indirectly by
forming character, outlook and cognitive capacity, so has normative implications.
Some sorts of non-fictional writing have also traditionally been seen as having strong
normative implications: the study of history was once seen as instructive, as training

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Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
220 Onora O’Neill

the judgement and teaching statecraft; the study of rhetoric as improving capacities to
persuade and take part in civic affairs.
However, applied ethics does not continue this tradition. Like other contemporary
writing in the humanities and social sciences, and indeed like much contemporary
fiction, it does not purport to edify or instruct, and is reticent about claims to form
character, outlook or cognitive capacity. Overtly instructive writing flourishes, of course,
in a myriad books of practical advice and instruction: but this is no longer how we seek
to do ethics. Attempts to provide ethical instruction or edification, or to shape readers’
character, outlook or cognitive capacities, are likely to be seen as old-fashioned, even
naïve, and as making normative assumptions for which no adequate reasons are given,
of seeking (at best) to persuade and not to reason. Applied ethics has hoped to do
more, and to reach wider audiences.

2. Non-Naturalism: Description and Internal Critique

Applied ethics is both more ambitious and more academic than these traditional
approaches to ethics. Yet it differs radically from most other current writing in the
humanities and social sciences. It is, I think, worth considering just where the difference
lies. Applied ethics clearly differs from the truth-oriented inquiries of the natural
sciences. More surprisingly it also differs from most of the supposedly non-naturalistic
work to be found in the humanities and in so-called ‘qualitative’ social inquiry. The
natural sciences seek to explain natural events and their causes. Work in the humanities
and qualitative social inquiry aims primarily at description (above all at thick description),
at an understanding of meaning or (as it is often rather oddly put) of meanings, but
eschews normative claims. It seeks to discover, articulate or analyse how the world has
been represented in one or another text, image, discourse, mentalité, practice or culture, or
what is now called identity (and used, less confusedly, be spoken of as sense of identity).
It therefore sees normative claims as legitimate, indeed important, objects of study, but
not as its proper aim.
This conception of the proper task and method of writing in the humanities and
‘qualitative’ social inquiry allows for criticism of normative claims, but only if that
criticism is internal or immanent. Such criticism can reveal internal tensions and
incoherencies in the representations that are articulated or analysed, but will not offer
reasons for normative claims to those who do not accept the modes of thought and
representations described and dissected.
This point is quite often overlooked. In particular, if is often assumed that certain
approaches to social inquiry, such as public opinion polls, public consultations and
‘deliberative’ exercises, can have normative implications for public policy. But when
such work is taken to have practical importance (whether for policy formation, or for
social or personal life), this assumption is invited to take too much weight. Knowing
how matters are sometimes or often represented does not automatically lead to or
support normative conclusions, other than normative conclusions that are relativised
to these representations. The findings of public opinion polls and exercises in public
engagement or deliberation therefore cannot settle ethical or policy questions, and can
make at best a limited contribution to public policy formation.1 Finding out what some
people think or feel, or even what a lot of people think or feel, about some domain of

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issues — or even what they think and feel after being informed, discussing and
deliberating — however interesting, does not by itself lead to any normative (let alone
specifically ethical) conclusions. A consensus can be iniquitous, impractical or irrelevant.
Rather, any transition from claims about representations to claims about what ought
to be done, whether for reasons of self interest or prudence, or for ethical or political
reasons, needs additional premises and arguments if it is not to be an instance of the
naturalistic fallacy, of an argument from the dubious authority of consensus or majority
opinion — or, indeed, of no argument at all.
At best, then, internal critique of the representations accepted by some individual
or group may have normative implications for those who already accept that way of
representing matters. If they have failed to take on board the full implications of the
representations to which they are committed, internal critique may offer them reasons
to revise their positions. I have found internal critique quite a useful approach in
discussing socially entrenched or received views of ethical requirements, such as
contemporary conceptions of press freedom as simply a form of freedom of expression
and views of informed consent requirements currently taken in clinical and research
practice.2 However, where there is no dominant ideology or practice to be dissected
and queried, internal critique is not likely to be normatively fertile.
If this sketch is approximately true — and it is, of course highly simplified — then
it must fall to other approaches to make and defend normative claims. Applied ethics
is an obvious, indeed assertively eager, applicant for this work.

3. Methodological and Epistemic Non-Naturalism

These claims about the normative limitations of much writing in the humanities and
the ‘qualitative’ parts of social inquiry may seem surprising. Those working in these
areas often see their work as non-naturalistic, and contrast it with work in the natural
sciences and in other, often more quantitative, work in the social sciences. The characteristic
methods for studying and understanding the representations that constitute social,
cultural and human worlds indeed differ from those used to study events in the natural
world. Work in the humanities and ‘qualitative’ work in social inquiry aims at Verstehen
rather than Erklärung, at a grasp of the formal causes (structure, meaning, articulation)
of the representations that constitute social, cultural and human worlds, rather that
at a grasp of the efficient causes of events that make up the natural world. So these
interpretive approaches are certainly non-naturalistic, even anti-naturalistic, and if they
are non-naturalistic, should they not be apt for grounding normative claims?
This hope cannot, I believe, be sustained because non-naturalism comes in various
kinds, and writing in the humanities and social inquiry is not non-naturalistic in the
way that normative work requires. The methodological non-naturalism that is common in
writing in the humanities and ‘qualitative’ work in social inquiry is often combined
with a more fundamental form of naturalism. Work that inquires into the nature of
representations is naturalistic in a broad, epistemic sense of the term. It aims to be
true of the way aspects of the world — namely certain representations — are or have
been, rather than to show that aspects of the world should be changed to fit certain
standards. The direction of fit of such work is the same as the direction of fit of work
in the natural sciences: it is empirical, not normative in its aims, and is non-naturalistic

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only in its focus on representations rather than on natural objects and events. Work in
the humanities and social sciences that aims to be true of human and social life may
be methodologically non-naturalistic in its focus on representations and meaning rather
than on events and causes, but is nevertheless epistemically naturalistic.
The evidence that most work in the humanities and in social inquiry is epistemically
naturalistic is, I think, ubiquitous and commonplace. It is now seems uncontroversial
that historical writing should aim for truth in the sense of fidelity to evidence, rather
than at patriotism or propaganda at the expense of fidelity to evidence; that the academic
study of grammar is a descriptive, not a normative discipline; that social anthropology
should aim at accurate articulation of the self-understanding of the societies studied
rather than at satisfying a dubious appetite for the exotic; that the study of rhetoric
is not an upmarket training in winning friends and influencing people, but a way of
reaching a deeper and more perceptive understanding and appreciation of texts.
Of course, these aims may be betrayed in practice, and there is no doubt plenty of
unreasoned or unselfconscious persuasion and propaganda in work that purports to
study representations: like the natural sciences, the humanities and social inquiry have
their wishful thinkers, and no doubt some charlatans.
So the normative ambitions of applied ethics are at odds with the epistemically
naturalistic approaches of most other academic work in the humanities and in
‘qualitative’ social inquiry. Here we have a genre of academic writing that seeks to
identify and vindicate normative, action-guiding claims, and then relate them to the
facts of situations or cases (including, of course, facts about the representations
accepted by the relevant agents). So applied ethics aspires to meet the demands both
of normative and of truth-oriented, epistemically naturalistic inquiry. Taken together
these are heavy demands.
The more obvious reasons why these are heavy demands is that the principles that
are needed for ‘applied’ ethics are normative principles; and that some of them must
be ethical principles. Hence applied ethics cannot be indifferent to the underlying
rigours of metaethics. Here, as we all know, there are uncomfortably few options —
or perhaps we should say a few uncomfortable options. Consequentialists must
advance with a convincing account of the good, whether objective or subjective, before
they can hope to articulate instrumental claims that shadow causal reasoning and pick
out normative principles that can serve for applied ethics. Contractualists can justify
normative demands only by showing why one or another account of hypothetical
reasoned agreement binds agents to principles to which they have not in fact agreed.
Relativists may hope — in my view without realistic expectations — to wring normative
principles from claims about how things are understood or represented. Particularists
may hope to traverse from thick descriptions of situations directly to normative
judgements of those situations. Nobody would underestimate the demands faced
by any of these ways of securing ethically significant normative claims. The only
alternatives that I can see are also strenuous: they seek to make the most of the rather
meagre constraints of consistency and coherence, augmented perhaps by Kantian
requirements to eschew principles that cannot be principles for all.
Given these towering difficulties, one might expect those who seek to do applied
ethics to falter at an early stage when they reflect on the difficulties the lie behind any
justification of normative principles. I think that it is worth wondering why many do
not, and indeed are quite optimistic about finding convincing normative principles.

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I think that this is usually because the demands of metaethics are explicitly bracketed
rather than ignored, often with the optimistic thought that all plausible ethical theories
will endorse a common range of central ethical principles, whose implications can then
be explored. In other cases optimism is sustained more economically by explicitly
framing examples and problems in terms of established norms that are neither justified
nor challenged. A fair amount of work in ‘applied’ ethics takes for granted established
legal frameworks, the norms of established professional cultures or human rights
claims. For example, it is not unknown for philosophical discussion of press freedom
in the US to invoke the First Amendment to the US Constitution, presumably assuming
that its juridical status guarantees ethical authority; it is not unknown for human rights
claims to be accorded ethical authority on the basis of their ratification by the states
party to the relevant conventions, without offering any argument to show how ratification
can ground ethical norms.3
The defect of such moves is evident. Each relies at one or more points on some
version of an argument from authority. But this must be a dispiriting move for an
enterprise that sets out to provide ethical reasoning that lays claim to attention beyond
the circles that already accept a particular authority. As long as we uncritically
presuppose a certain theory, theology, ideology, institutional framework or professional
outlook, any normative implications derived from it will, it seems, be conditional on
accepting the assumptions embedded in the outlook, views or representations from
which the argument begins — so on some version of an argument from authority or
from consensus. Reliance on such arguments defeats the wider normative ambitions of
applied ethics by unargued acceptance of the preferred theory, theology, ideology,
institutions, or practices.
In the end, I suspect, writing in applied ethics is mainly confident that the normative
principles it invokes can be justified because it assumes that somebody else will provide
the metaethical arguments needed if reasons for normative claims are to reach beyond
the like-minded. However, even if we assume such a division of labour, and accept that
applied ethics borrows rather than establishes ethical norms, a less obvious difficulty
cuts deeper. This second difficulty is that it is not easy to see what it means to apply
a practical principle, hence not easy to see how normative principles — even if they
can be justified — can guide action. I now turn to this second difficulty.

4. Normativity: Application or Enactment?

The distinctive feature of normative work is that its direction of fit is unashamedly the
converse of that of empirical or descriptive work that aims at truth claims. Its theories
are neither explanatory nor interpretive, its aims are neither Erklärung nor Verstehen.
Rather than arguing that aspects of the world, among them representations, satisfy
certain descriptions and principles, it argues that aspects of the world should be
changed to fit certain descriptions and principles. That is what it is for work to be
normative or prescriptive rather than empirical or descriptive. I do not think there is
much disagreement on this point. But I think there is far less agreement about what
it is to apply normative principles, and how they are to guide action.
The term ‘applied ethics’ suggests that normative principles are applied to particular
cases, just as concepts or theories are applied to particular cases in truth-oriented

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inquiry. However this is a misleading analogy. Writing in applied ethics depicts normative
principles as applying to specific types of case or situation, rather than to particular cases.
A focus on types of case seems both acceptable and unavoidable because the aim, after
all, is not to take over the activities of practitioners in one or another domain of life by
dealing with actual cases, but to suggest how certain sorts of activities might generally
be well undertaken. So writing in applied ethics has to abstract from the details of
actual cases, in favour of discussing schematically presented types of situation or case.
Even discussions illustrated by reference to one or another well-documented example
of a particular past case will see this case through the lens of specific descriptions —
hence as a type of case. When ‘cases’ are discussed in applied ethics, they are seen as
types of context or situation that may fall under a principle.
Parenthetically, this means that the elaboration of examples, which is taken very
seriously in some work in applied ethics, has little point. I do not mean just that
there is little point in devising examples in which protagonists who formerly made
their way under the aliases A, B and C are suddenly renamed Alison, Buddy and
Carla, with studiously gender-neutral social implausibility. I mean that the general
presumption that more detail will be better is unconvincing. Better for what, we might
ask? What advantage does additional detail supply? Certain additional details can
indeed be used to reveal the implications of rigid application of simple principles:
but for that purpose an illustrative example with a single feature that illuminates the
principle under discussion will be enough. I may come to rethink my commitment to
the death penalty when I grasp the tension between this principle and a principle of
protecting the innocent from punishment, especially irrevocable punishment. I do not
need to consider actual miscarriages of justice, or actual criminal trials: I merely need
to know that miscarriages of justice happen. I may rethink my acceptance of the use
of torture of supposed criminals when I see that it is likely to corrupt testimony and
undermine prosecutions. Again I do not need to consider actual cases where torture
has elicited unreliable confessions: I merely need to know that this happens. These
might not be the best or the only reasons for rethinking commitment to these
principles, but they may all the same be weighty and sufficient considerations, and
show that we do not need to think about narrowly or vividly specified types of
case, let alone particular cases, when thinking about the implications of a normative
principle — ethical or other.
The more fundamental problem is that speaking of the ‘application’ of principles to
‘cases’, as is standard in some writing in applied ethics, suggests a misleading analogy
with the application of empirical or theoretical principles to cases in epistemically
naturalistic inquiries, where principles stand in need of reformulation, refinement,
revision or rejection if they do not fit actual cases. By contrast in normative, including
ethical, discussion agents who are committed both to specific principles and to specific
accounts of cases or situations to which those principles apply, will have no reason to
reformulate, refine, revise or reject a principle if a case or situation fails to fit the
principle. The fact that way things are often flouts normative principles that we take
seriously is a reason for seeking to change the world (in small part) so that it lives up
to the principle, not for dropping or changing the principle.
In empirical, truth-oriented reasoning the relation of principle to particular case is
correctly termed application, and principles must fit the cases to which they are applied,
or be put in question. However in normative reasoning reference to cases merely

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indicates a type of context or situation in which a principle might be deployed (and even
this point may have to be qualified). Empirical and theoretical principles are put in
question by counterexamples that do not satisfy them; normative principles are not.
Application of theoretical and empirical principles is essential to reasoning about the
world, and can determine what should (provisionally) be believed. Application of
normative principles is only a matter of identifying a context for use, and since principles
are indeterminate does not determine what should be done. Normative, including
ethical, principles are not deployed merely by identifying types of context for their use,
but rather by enacting them. Normative reasoning aims to be action guiding. Its aim is
to enact rather than to apply principles, and this cannot be done merely by specifying
the types of context or situation for which a principle may be relevant.
Once we distinguish the application of principles from their enactment, additional
questions come into focus. Given that principles, like the types of situations and cases
to which they relevant, are indeterminate, they can have many possible enactments.
Normative principles cannot determine just which of many differing enactments
should be aimed for in a given situation. Indeed, given that multiple normative principles
are relevant in most situations, it may be difficult to enact all of them, yet hard to
assign priority among them. Do the indeterminacy and multiplicity of principles
shackle their capacity to guide action?
On one view, any worry about indeterminacy may seem trivial. Only if we imagine
implausibly that principles are to provide algorithms for action, it might be said, will
it seem problematic that they underdetermine their enactments. To enact a principle
is simply to take some course of action that satisfies it; to meet an obligation is to act
in some way that satisfies that obligation; to respect a prohibition is to act in some way
that does not contravene that prohibition. Equally, to enact a multiplicity of principles
is simply to take some course of action that satisfies them.
Yet, on reflection, this account of acting on normative principles says too little. It
represents all ways of enacting a principle as on a par: but surely there are better and
worse ways enacting any principle, or plurality of principles. Yet to say more about why
some enactments are better than others we seem to need some additional point of
reference. We need, it seems, not merely to justify certain principles, and to identify
types of situation or context — ‘cases’ — for which they are relevant, but also some
account of practical judgement that indicates how they should be enacted. Yet this has
proved notoriously elusive.
These points might be taken — quite often are taken — as reasons to turn one’s
back on any ethical position that centres on principles, and to look to some account
of intuition or judgement of cases or situations, to carry the entire burden of practical,
including ethical, decisions. I do not think this a promising route, although I shall say
little about it on this occasion.

5. Defeasibility and Practical Judgement

I think there are broadly two ways to approach the problem that indeterminate principles
do not show agents how to select among their possible enactments. One way would
be to try to eliminate, or perhaps manage, the problem by formulating more specific
principles. The other would be to offer an account of practical judgement that can go at

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least some way towards guiding the move from indeterminate principles to particular
enactments.
Any thought that problems that arise from the indeterminacy of principles can be
eliminated or even managed by formulating more determinate principles seems to
me implausible. Setting out more elaborated or specific principles does not eliminate
indeterminacy. Normativity requires indeterminacy because it requires relevance to
situations that are still open and unresolved. There is no way of building so much
into principles that indeterminacy is eliminated — and going in that direction by
incorporating unending distinctions, restrictions and exceptions, thereby formulating
more and more specific principles, is likely to have diminishing practical point.
Any account of practical judgement needs to accept that normative principles are
ineliminably indeterminate.
But if this is the case, applied ethics may falter for further reasons. Practical principles,
including ethical principles, are not deployed one by one. The types of cases that provide
contexts for their use invariably fall under multiple normative principles, including
multiple ethical principles. The fact that we are typically committed to numerous nor-
mative principles, including numerous ethical principles, that demand joint satisfaction
can generate tension and conflict — even irresolvable conflict, so seemingly threatens to
undermine the prospects for any principle-based approach to practical let alone ethical
reasoning. I think that this thought is too hasty, and that commitment to a plurality of
indeterminate principles does not automatically lead to irresolvable problems.
Agents who are committed to a plurality of principles often find that this creates no
great difficulty. Nearly all of the time most agents manage to meet the demands of
many well-entrenched ethical principles: we constantly and simultaneously refrain from
perjury and injury, from theft and slander — and it is not too difficult! Indeed, nearly
all of the time agents live up to all of these principles and a plethora of other practical
principles that we might variously think of as legal, professional or social rather than
specifically ethical. Needless to say, these ordinary achievements are hardly a reason
for self-congratulation.
Yet in some cases the joint satisfaction of a plurality of practical principles creates
problems. For example, given a principle of respect for marriage a whole slew of
thoughts about what each party owes the other and about what others owe them as a
couple slides into place — whether to be accepted and enacted or to be challenged or
modified. However, if we add to the specification of the type of case that a marriage
is bigamous or forced, many of those assumptions may falter. At this point respect for
the personal liberty and wellbeing of the person who has been deceived or forced is in
tension with a principle of respect for marriage. While we can ‘save’ the principle of
respecting marriage by arguing that here there is no real marriage, or only a ‘form’ of
marriage that should not be respected, this move merely cloaks the real problem,
which is that there are strong reasons for thinking that normative principles, including
ethical principles, are not only indeterminate, but defeasible. There is no plausible way
of establishing a hierarchy of practical principles to show which should be relegated
when joint satisfaction is impossible. If so, how are agents to work out which of many
normative principles should take priority in a specific situation? Once we acknowledge
that we do not enact normative, including ethical, principles one by one, we must
accept that where it is not possible to enact all relevant principles jointly, some will
have to be accorded priority and others relegated.

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But, if normative principles cannot be enacted one by one and without further
consideration in each situation in which they can be deployed, it seems that their
vindication cannot settle what should be done when a case of a given type arises. We
may claim that a normative principle shows what must be done, as we say, ceteris
paribus: but this comforting tag obscures the reality that normative principles do not
show what must be done, since the very cases that are most problematic will be
complicated ones where ceteris non paribus.
Viewing normative principles as defeasible appears unavoidable, yet will it not blunt
the edge of any normative claim and leave the ambitions of applied ethics stranded?
When we apply empirical principles, contrary cases constitute prima facie counter
examples and demand some refinement, reformulation, restriction or rejection of the
principle applied. When we enact normative principles, it is unclear on what basis
we view certain possible enactments as unacceptable or inadequate, as grounds for
thinking that the (type of) case is ‘an exception’, or that the principle is defeated by
some other principle. It looks as if viewing normative principles as defeasible ends up
endorsing at least a partial retreat from seeing them as genuinely normative.

6. Practical Judgement and Effective Policies

However, on another view, which I shall sketch, the defeasibility of normative principles
is a strength, not a weakness, because it provides the basis for an account of practical
judgement. By this I do not mean simply that it opens a way to escape from unwelcome
aspects of rigid reliance on principles, as maintained by those who think principles
irrelevant to ethical conduct. Those who doubt the importance of principles in practical
reasoning do not see them as defeasible, but as dispensable; they cast doubt on the very
need for normative principles, and throw the burden of justification onto responses to
cases. Those who see principles as defeasible still take them to be important, and insist
that even where justified principles cannot be enacted, they must be taken seriously.
What they need to show is how agents who are committed to multiple normative
principles are to deploy them. How is the move from a plurality of defeasible principles
to one or another particular enactment of those principles be made? How does practical
judgement work?
Reflective Equilibrium is often seen as offering part of an answer to this question. It
is a popular half-way house for those who find themselves uncomfortable both with the
thought that there are indefeasible normative principles and with claims that principles
are dispensable. By adopting a coherentist method that takes into account not only
principles but ‘considered judgements’, it suggests that we can find a way both to adjust
principles in the light of ‘cases’, and to shape enactments by principles. However, it
seems to me that Reflective Equilibrium is really a way of seeking coherence among a set
of principles of greater and lesser generality. ‘Considered judgements’ are not responses
to particular cases (which can be pretty unconsidered). Rather they are normative
judgements of types of cases — that is to say, they are themselves (more and less specific)
practical principles. Reflective Equilibrium in the end is a way of ‘equilibrating’ —
seeking coherence — among a plurality of principles of greater and lesser generality.
However, an appeal to coherence among principles does not show enough about
practical judgement. Often there are many ways of accommodating a plurality of

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principles coherently to one another, and some coherent accommodations may

surely be better than others. Practical judgment should presumably offer some way of
distinguishing better from worse enactments of principles. Reflective Equilibrium
does not provide a way of doing this.
Nevertheless, Reflective Equilibrium offers a useful clue to the process of practical
judgment. By drawing attention to the claims and the problems of living by a plurality
of principles, it pinpoints the right starting point for an account of the enactment of
practical principles. The task of practical judgment is to select among possible ways of
jointly enacting the various principles to which an agent is committed. We never find
ourselves confronted with the task of conforming to a single normative requirement (if
we did the task of practical judgement would be considerably simpler!4).
The practical ambitions of ‘applied’ ethics are, I suggest, secured rather than under-
mined by the fact that we approach any situation with a plurality of defeasible normative
requirements in mind. This is just as true of practical reasoning in which ethical issues
are marginal, as it is of practical reasoning in which they are centre stage. Practical
judgment is as much needed in bringing a building project in on time, on budget and
to the specified design as it is in working out how to keep all promises made without
unkindness. It is needed as much in working out how to respect standards of courtesy
while conforming to the norms of contemporary business practice as it is in working
out how care for patients while respecting their individual ‘autonomy’. These and
countless other situations require judgement — practical judgement — about ways in
which and the extent to which a range of ethical and other requirements can be jointly
enacted.
This may seem surprising. I think this is because a large tranche of writing in applied
ethics focuses on distinctive types of case where joint satisfaction of normative principles,
and specifically of ethical principles, is contingently impossible, as in the literatures on
moral dilemmas and dirty hands.5 This focus is readily taken as suggesting that commit-
ment to a plurality of principles leads only to conflict, even to tragedy. It may however
be a mistake to focus too narrowly on these cases, although understandably tempting
(especially for those eager to show the difficulty or even the incoherence of relying on
principles). Of course, something will have to be said about the distinctive cases where
joint satisfaction of principles is impossible and some of the normative principles to
which an agent is committed — ethical or other — cannot be jointly enacted.6
However, the more instructive issues arise when a plurality of principles can be
jointly enacted in a number of ways, but the matter is not straightforward. These,
I believe are the types of cases that reveal most about the task of practical judgment.
They are very common and do not need any elaborate stage setting. A short list of
principles that quite often come into some tension with one another might include:
looking after family interests while avoiding nepotism; protecting public security while
respecting the civil liberties of dissidents; respecting both freedom of expression and
individual privacy; providing important public goods (water and air quality, road and
product safety) while respecting individual liberty; protecting public health while
respecting individual freedom to take certain risks; protecting children without
over-protecting them; protecting employees’ rights without undermining management.
The list could go on and on.
Just as these tensions are recurrent, so too are the approaches that can be used to
avert and manage potential conflicts and tensions between principles. Principles are

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 Applied Ethics: Naturalism, Normativity and Public Policy 229

most readily enacted when the means and space for their enactment is institutionally
and culturally secured. So a large part of the task of practical judgment is a matter of
developing and maintaining an institutional and cultural framework that will make the
joint satisfaction of important principles, including important ethical principles, more
feasible in more contexts. We rely on public institutions and cultural practices to avert,
limit, routinise and resolve tensions in the enactment of principles that would otherwise
frequently lead to tension or conflict. Practical judgement in the face of plural and
contingently conflicting demands is often most effectively achieved not by focussing on
the resolution of dilemmas, however exquisitely characterised, but by public policies
that routinely avert and reduce conflicts and tensions, and provide recognised routes
for their accommodation.
If we think of applied ethics merely as discussing principles and the types of situations
in which they might be applied, we say too little about the practical task of working
out how principles are to be enacted in those situations, and how conflicts and potential
conflicts between them are best handled or averted. Nor do we learn much about this
practical task merely by labelling it practical judgment. We could, however, learn a good
deal about this task by considering the institutional and cultural means by which joint
enactment of a plurality of potentially conflicting principles might be eased, even
routinised.
Much discussion of ways in which conflicts between principles can managed or
averted — or exacerbated — is to be found in empirical studies of institutional structures
and public policy, rather than in normative writing. Writing on ‘applied’ ethics does
not often discuss institutional remedies for likely conflicts between principles ranging
from time-management to dealing with principal-agent problems, from the regulation
of conflicts of interest and limitation of role conflict to the avoidance of perverse
incentives and moral hazard. Nor, in my view, does it pay enough attention to the
ethical difficulties and tensions that dysfunctional or hyper complex institutions and
practices create. Yet there is no reason why a wider and more practical approach to
ethics should not take these matters seriously.
So practical ethics can go beyond the consideration of principles and the types of
situations in which they could or should be applied by saying more about the institutional
structures and cultural support needed if respect for significant ethical and other
principles is to be adequately achieved in public, professional and private life. It could,
for example, focus more on ways in which systems of accountability could be structured
to support rather than undermine the intelligent placing and refusal of trust or on
shaping institutional structures that can secure and allocate the obligations needed if
human rights are to be taken seriously. It could say more about ways in which
supposed rights to freedom of expression can — or cannot — be reconciled with
intellectual property regimes. It could say more about the relevance — or inadequacy
— of demands for transparency in improving communication and public policy. It
could say more about better and worse ways of constructing regulatory regimes to
secure and support compliance with ethical principles. These are rich pastures, and
those of us who take normative reasoning seriously could explore them.
To do practical ethics we need not only to think hard about the justification of ethical
principles, and the specification of types of or context for which they are relevant. We
need to think less about with ‘application’, and address the implications of the fact that
agents are always committed to a plurality of indeterminate and defeasible normative

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230 Onora O’Neill

principles, so that conflict and tension between enactments of principles may arise. In
short, we need to move from discussions of principles relevant to specifiable situations
and contexts, to discussions of policies and institutions that support processes of
practical judgment by making it easier to achieve adequate enactments of those
principles in more and more demanding situations.
Commitment to a plurality of normative principles, I have suggested, does not
undermine, but rather provides a basis for practical judgment. Practical judgment is
exercised both in identifying ways in which normative principles can be jointly enacted
— when they can — and otherwise in building and maintaining structures and policies
that help to avert, limit or resolve tension and conflicts between enactments of normative
principles, and in dealing with remainders where joint enactment is impossible or not
achieved. Normative, including ethical, principles are not adequately deployed simply
by identifying types of situation or case which fall under them, in which (not to which!)
they could be applied. Their full deployment is a matter of constructing, supporting
and working within structures and policies, institutions and cultures that buttress the
feasibility of the joint enactment of the principles to which agents are committed.

Onora O’Neill, Department of Philosophy, University of Cambridge, Sidgwick Avenue,

Cambridge CB3 9DA, UK. [email protected]

NOTES

1 Those who think they can make a larger contribution may do so because they assume that the (supposedly)
democratic approaches of pollsters have unquestionable moral and political weight. This thought has two
limitations. First, most forms of polling and deliberation have at best indirect democratic credentials.
Second, the moral claims of democratic processes fade if normative conditions are not met. Most obviously,
arguments from democracy carry little weight unless the rule of law and a range of rights of the person are
in place.
2 Onora O’Neill, Rethinking Freedom of the Press (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2004); Neil C. Manson and
Onora O’Neill, Rethinking Informed Consent in Bioethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
3 Even its capacity to ground juridical norms is suspect, given that many of the states party ratified cynically,
without either will or capacity to assign or enforce the obligations needed to establish justiciable rights.
4 Or alternatively complicated, for example if the single principle cannot be deployed without demanding
metrics as in the case of Utilitarianism.
5 I take it that the case of principles that are intrinsically not jointly satisfiable is not of practical importance:
those who commit themselves to two or more such principles (e.g. to principles of being wholly open and
wholly secretive in all matters) need to reconsider the justifications of the principles to which they are
ostensibly committed.
6 In such cases, where the claims of some principles to which an agent is committed cannot be jointly
enacted, they can nevertheless be acknowledged. Such acknowledgement will require attention to the ways
in which remainders arise in the wake of unmet or contingently unmeetable requirements, in and beyond
ethical reasoning. It would, I believe, be possible to make the literature on remainders richer and more
convincing by concentrating rather less on emotional and attitudinal responses to unmet obligations —
remorse, regret, guilt — and rather more on practical responses such as making amends, reparations,
renegotiation, compensation, apology and many others.

© Society for Applied Philosophy, 2009