Applied Ethics

With regard to a globally sustainable development of society and technology, we are today faced with a multitude of very different challenges and tasks that are accompanied by moral differences or conflicts. Argumentatively convincing solutions must be sought for these, which can or should be incorporated into political decisions or technical innovation processes.

A number of such challenges are addressed in different areas of “applied ethics”. These include, for example, the ethics of research, science and technology (which can be further subdivided into machine ethics, robot ethics, ethics of autonomous driving, AI ethics …), climate, environmental and sustainability ethics, business ethics, bioethics and medical ethics, but also the ethics of war and humanitarian interventions. In addition, feminist ethics is another perspective that analyses social injustices in the sense of social sustainability and presents corresponding solutions in the sense of gender justice.

In all these areas, specific questions arise for which answers are to be found with the help of different ethical theories such as virtue ethics, ethics of duty or utilitarianism. At the same time, the thematic plurality of applied ethics makes it clear that the nature of the research field requires an interdisciplinary exchange, which is guaranteed by the implementation in the “Leonardo” project.