thumb|The Thinker. Attempting to differentiate applied philosophy from pure philosophy.
Applied philosophy (philosophy from Greek: φιλοσοφία, philosophia, 'love of wisdom') is a branch of philosophy that studies philosophical problems of practical concern. The topic covers a broad spectrum of issues in environment, medicine, science, engineering, policy, law, politics, economics and education. The term was popularised in 1982 by the founding of the Society for Applied Philosophy by Brenda Almond, and its subsequent journal publication Journal of Applied Philosophy edited by Elizabeth Brake. Methods of applied philosophy are similar to other philosophical methods including questioning, dialectic, critical discussion, rational argument, systematic presentation, thought experiments and logical argumentation.
Applied philosophy is differentiated from pure philosophy primarily by dealing with specific topics of practical concern, whereas pure philosophy does not take an object; metaphorically it is philosophy applied to itself; exploring standard philosophical problems and philosophical objects (e.g. metaphysical properties) such as the fundamental nature of reality, epistemology and morality among others. Applied philosophy is therefore a subsection of philosophy, broadly construed it does not deal with topics in the purely abstract realm, but takes a specific object of practical concern.
Definitions
General definition
Due to the recent coinage of the term, the full scope and meaning of Applied Philosophy is at times still quite ambiguous and contentious, but generally does interact with the several other general definitions of philosophy. A Companion of Applied Philosophy provides three introductory articles by Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, David Archard and Suzanne Uniacke that outline general definitions and parameters for the field of Applied Philosophy.
In the first chapter, Lippert-Rasmussen article “The Nature of Applied Philosophy” begins by unpacking the term “applied philosophy”, outlining that to apply is a verb that takes an object, therefore if one were doing philosophy and not applying it to something then one would be grammatically or conceptually confused to say that one is doing applied philosophy. Lippert-Rasmussen provides seven conceptions of Applied Philosophy: the relevance conception, the specificity conception, the practical conception, the activist conception, the methodological conception, the empirical facts conception, the audience conception. These definitions are specified in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, making the different conceptions incompatible with one another. Lippert-Rasmussen stresses that applied philosophy is much larger than that of applied ethics, therefore applied philosophers should strive beyond just proposing normative moral frameworks, allowing for Applied Philosophy to offer metaphysical frameworks for understanding contemporary results in other sciences and disciplines.
In the third chapter of A Companion of Applied Philosophy, Suzanne Uniacke's article “The Value of Applied Philosophy”, Uniacke outlines that applied philosophy is really a field of philosophical inquiry, differentiating itself from pure philosophy by claiming the former can provide practical guidance on issues beyond the philosophical domain. Within applied philosophy there are generally two modes of focus, it can be academically focused (for an academic audience), or it can be in “out-reach mode” (for a non-academic audience). In drawing on philosophical subdisciplines such as metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, applied philosophers shape their contributions and analysis on issues of practical concern. In this intersection between philosophical theories, principles, and concepts with issues beyond that of the purely philosophical domain (out-reach mode), these problems may give valuable challenges to traditionally accepted philosophies, providing a stress test, feedback or friction on principles that are so often confined within the idealistic philosophical framework.
Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen: seven conceptions
Relevance conception: Claims that philosophy is applied if and only if it is relevant to important questions of everyday life. To be clear this conception claims that applied philosophy need not answer the important questions of everyday life, yet it needs to philosophically explore or at least be relevant to them. There is no requirement on what type of everyday life questions are relevant, it can vary across time and audience, some questions may be relevant to some people at one time and to others at another.
Specificity conception: Philosophy is applied if, and only if, it addresses a comparatively specific question within the branch of philosophy, e.g., metaphysics, epistemology or moral philosophy, to which it belongs. Establishes philosophical principles to then apply and explore their implications in the applied (non-philosophical) specific domains of inquiry.
Practical conception: Philosophy is applied if, and only if, it justifies an answer to comparatively specific questions within its relevant branch of philosophy about what we ought to do.
Activist conception: Philosophy is applied if, and only if, it is motivated by an ambition of having a certain causal effect on the world. Whether that causal effect be to educate, elucidate or edify on a given topic, with real world consequences thereof. As Lippert-Rasmussen points out, much of pure philosophy has quite an impact on the world and yet one would still claim it to be pure rather than applied philosophy, however the distinction of the activist conception lies in their goal, the activist conception has greater emphasis on being an educator and having a causal impact on the world, changing their primary philosophical commitment from “knowledge and truth” to having a causal impact. The change of commitment and goals may result in the change of methods in order to realize their goal.
Empirical facts conception: Philosophy is applied if, and only if, it is significantly informed by empirical evidence – in particular, that provided by empirical sciences. Stresses the interdisciplinary nature of applied philosophy, characterising applied philosophy as drawing on the results of empirical sciences and the evidence thereof to be sufficiently informed in contributing philosophical analysis and input.
Audience conception: Philosophy is applied if, and only if, its intended audience is non-philosophers. Despite the audience conception not always requiring background knowledge of the given audience, it is prudent for philosophers who are engaging with specific scientific disciplines to be well read on the empirical facts of those disciplines the philosopher addresses, thus re-iterating the value of being empirically informed with the facts, especially when engaging with interdisciplinary studies of philosophy with some other subject.
Applied moral philosophy
Applied moral philosophy (or applied ethics) is the branch of moral philosophy concerned with philosophical inquiry into moral issues that arise in everyday contexts and institutional design frameworks (e.g. how social institutions are structured). Applied moral philosophy involves the use of philosophical theories and methods of analysis to treat fundamentally moral problems in non-philosophical subjects, such as technology, public policy, and medicine. This includes the use of fundamental moral principles and theories to assess particular social practices, arrangements, and norms prevailing in particular societies at particular times. Beauchamp (1984) notes where applied moral philosophy and theoretical ethics diverge is not in their methodologies, but rather, in the content of their analysis and assessment. Applied ethics first gained mainstream popularity in 1967, as many professions such as law, medicine and engineering were profoundly affected by social issues and injustices at the time. For example, various environmental movements sparked political conversations about humanities relationship to the natural world, which led to the development of important philosophical arguments against anthropocentrism. As awareness of these social concerns grew, so did discussions of them in academic philosophy. By the 1970s and 1980s, there was a surge in publications devoted to philosophical inquiry of subjects in applied ethics, which were initially directed at biomedical ethics, and later business ethics.
Freeman (1998) presents a competing theory of corporate social responsibility by appealing to pre-theoretical commitments about the moral significance of assessing who an action affects and how. Proponents of stakeholder theory argue that corporate executives have moral responsibilities to all stakeholders in their business operations, including consumers, employees, and communities. Thus, a business decision may maximize profits for stockholders, but it is not morally permissible unless it does not conflict with the demands of other stakeholders in the company. Freeman (2008) takes a Rawlsian approach to mediate conflicts amongst stakeholders, where the right action is that which will promote the well-being of the stakeholders who are the least well-off. Danley (1980) disagrees and says that corporations cannot be moral agents merely because they are intentional, but that other considerations, such as the ability to be punished, must obtain when assigning moral responsibility to an agent.
Bioethics
Bioethics is the study of human conduct towards the animate and inanimate natural world against a background of life sciences. It provides a disciplinary framework for a wide array of moral questions in life sciences that concern humans, the environment, and animals. There are 3 main sub-disciplines of bioethics: medical ethics, animal ethics, and environmental ethics.
Medical ethics
Medical ethics can be traced back to the Hippocratic Oath in 500 B.C.E., making it the oldest sub-discipline of bioethics. Medical ethics concerns itself with questions of what one ought to do in particular moral situations arising in medical contexts. There are a number of key issues in medical ethics, such as end-of-life and beginning-of-life debates, physician-patient relationships, and adequate healthcare accessibility. She uses the violinist thought experiment to show that even if a fetus is a person, their right to life is not absolute, and therefore provided non-theistic and rational justification for the moral permissibility of abortion under certain conditions.
Another debate in medical ethics is about the moral permissibility of euthanasia, and under what conditions euthanasia is morally acceptable. Euthanasia is the intentional killing of another person in order to benefit them. One influential argument in favour of voluntary active euthanasia and voluntary passive euthanasia is put forth by Rachels (1975), who is not only able to show the permissibility of the latter in cases where someone's life is no longer worth living, but that there mere fact that active euthanasia involves killing someone and passive euthanasia involves letting them die does not make it more just to do one over the other. He presents his argument in response to critics who argue that it is morally worse to kill someone than to merely let them die. However, he considers a case where a husband wants his wife to die, and in one case, does so by putting lethal poison in her wine, and in the second case, walks in on her drowning in a bathtub and lets her die. He argues that his thought experiment shows why killing someone is not always morally worse than letting them die, forcing defenders of only passive euthanasia to also commit themselves to the moral permissibility of active euthanasia, unless they can show why only the former option is morally acceptable. King (1989) motivates her argument by examining the historical domination of women in society, and then argues that all other domination and hierarchies flow from this. Her argument justifies the moral wrongness of environmental degradation and human exploitation of nature not by arguing in favour of its intrinsic value, but by appealing to the moral wrongness of female oppression by a male-dominating culture. Historically, much of the work in political and legal philosophy has pursued more general issues, such as questions about the nature of justice, ideal forms of democracy, and how to organize political and legal institutions. Applied political and legal philosophy uses the insights of political and legal philosophy to critically examine more concrete issues within the disciplines. Some examples include philosophical inquiry into family-based immigration policies, understanding the conceptual structure of civil disobedience, and discussing the bounds of prosecutorial discretion in domestic violence cases.
Extreme activism is when a philosopher acts as an expert consultant and presents an argument directly to policy makers in favour of some view. Work in feminist political philosophy uses the various activist approaches to causally affect public policies and political institutions. For example, liberal feminist theorising, whose main concerns are protecting and enhancing women's political rights and personal autonomy, has consistently used conceptual activism to further their aims. As a result, there might be different (and more preferable) methods for acquiring knowledge depending on whose values guide one's orientation in life or what goals direct their pursuit of truth. Coady (2016) claims that social epistemology has not sufficiently addressed questions of what individuals ought to believe and how they should pursue knowledge. This branch of feminist philosophy also contributes to the scope of social epistemology as it identifies several ways in which conventional knowledge practices and processes disadvantage women, such as excluding them from inquiry, denying them epistemic authority, and producing theories of women which misrepresent them to serve patriarchal interests.
Feminist epistemology is not only applied in the sense that its liberatory goals are explicitly political and, as a result, seek a certain causal effect on the world. But this branch of epistemology is also greatly relevant since, to be effective activists, Wylie (2001) stresses that it is necessary “to understand the conditions that disadvantage women with as much empirical accuracy and explanatory power as possible.”
A demonstration of this necessity is that, since the Black and lesbian feminist theorizing of the 1980s, it is not effective anymore for feminists to investigate the conceptions and phenomena related to gender without the concept of intersectionality: which does not only make visible how the lived experiences of an individual and social group are shaped by their interdependent and overlapping identities, but also that, ultimately, their access to power and privilege is structured by those. Crenshaw (1989) coined this interpretative framework by investigating the failures of the legal courts in DeGraffenreid v General Motors (1976), Moore v Hughes Helicopter (1983), and Payne v Travenol (1976) to recognize that Black women were both discriminated on the basis of gender and of race.
Epistemology of deliberative democracy
The deliberative conception of democracy claims that public deliberation is necessary for the justification of this political system and the legitimacy of its decision-making processes. Broadly put, public deliberations refer to the open spaces where free and equal citizens share and discuss their reasons for supporting different policy proposals and societal ideas. This area of applied epistemology explores the epistemic values, virtues, and vices that underscore and can be observed to emerge from deliberative decision-making.
For instance, in the case of a referendum or an election, the Condorcet jury theorem (CJT) articulates that: if each voter is more likely than not to be correct on a topic on which they are asked to vote (i.e. the competence condition) and if each votes independently from one another (i.e. the independence condition), then it is not only the case that a majority of people is more likely to be correct than a single individual on the outcome of their vote. But it is also the case that the probability that a majority will vote for the correct outcome increases with the number of voters.
On the one hand, the CJT provides a solid defense and empirical argument for the importance of voting in democracy: this procedure leads decision-making bodies to make better decisions because of more accurate epistemic inputs. On the other hand, it also creates a debate on the influence of public deliberations on the well-functioning of voting procedures. While Estlund (1989) and Waldron (1989) claim that public deliberation, in its exchange of reasons and information about the outcomes under discussion, improves the competence condition of the votes, Dietrich and Spiekermann (2013) raise concerns about the fact that: if voters engage with one another too much prior to or at the moment of making a decision, the independence condition of the CJT is undermined and its optimistic results become distorted.
Many have also raised the ‘public ignorance’ objection to the deliberative conception of democracy: holding that most people are too ignorant for deliberative democracy to be an effective and viable practice. Talisse (2004) responds to this proposed limitation by claiming that it is unclear about what exactly ‘ignorance’ refers to — according to him, this objection conflates the states of being uninformed, misinformed, and uninterested — and that attributing culpability to those that ‘do not know’ takes responsibility away from the democratic institutions (like media and academia) that fail them.
While social epistemology takes a closer look at the roles of institutional practices to generate, mediate, or prevent knowledge acquisition, a substantial debate in the epistemology of deliberative democracy concerns the legal sanctions on speech, behavior and freedom of expression. The contribution of J.S. Mill (1859) is frequently referenced on this issue, notably supporting that free speech and public deliberation help to eliminate wrong opinions, permit correct beliefs to prevail, and, as a result, promote truth. Censorship and strict limitations of the public sphere would prevent different parties, in a disagreement, from even perceiving the truthful elements of their opponent's argument and could reinforce dogmatic tendencies in a given society. Landemore (2013) also supports that diversity is epistemically beneficial in deliberative democracies; there are higher chances to reach a correct truth if considering more diverse perspectives than few. Even if one can think of the dimensions of diversity that social and feminist epistemologies refer to, Kappel, Hallsson, and Møller (2016) also bring to the forefront of the discussion: diversity of knowledge, diversity of opinion, cognitive diversity, epistemic norm diversity, and non-epistemic value diversity.
If diversity may help to neutralize biases, ‘enclave deliberations’—a communicative process amongst like-minded people “who talk or even live, much of the time, in isolated enclaves”— can lead to group polarization. Sunstein (2002) defines group polarization as the phenomenon in which members of a group move towards a more extreme position during the process of deliberating with their peers than before doing so. For him, two reasons explain the statistical regularity of this phenomenon. On the one hand, he points to the fact that people do not usually discuss with groups that share different inclinations and predispositions on a particular topic: greatly limiting their ‘argument pool’. On the other hand, he acknowledges that group polarization also arises from the desire of group members to be perceived favourably by their peers.
Sunstein also points to the empirical evidence that diverse and heterogeneous groups tend to give less weight to the views of low-status members — the latter also being frequently more quiet in deliberative bodies. and Young (2000), amongst others.
Applied philosophers also propose epistemic virtues and valuable practices to cope with these epistemic vices and deliberative dysfunction. Starting from the premise that there is nothing wrong with changing and being convinced by others about our views, Peter (2013) suggests that it is how one navigates disagreements that matters. For her, well-conducted deliberations are those in which participants treat each other as epistemic peers, that is, they recognize that they are as likely to make a mistake along the way as their peers. As a result, they should not be closed to revising their original beliefs (especially if they realize that their arguments are not sufficiently robust) while holding themselves mutually accountable to one another.
Other topics that explore the epistemology of deliberative democracy include, but are not limited to: epistemic proceduralism, the value or disvalue of disagreement, epistocracy, and social integration, among others.
Applied ontology
Applied ontology involves the application of ontology to practical pursuits. This can involve adopting ontological principles in the creation of controlled, representational vocabularies. These vocabularies, referred to as 'ontologies', can be compiled to organize scientific information in a computer-friendly format.
One of the primary uses of ontologies is improving interoperability of data systems. Data within and between organizations can sometimes be trapped within data silos. Ontologies can improve data integration by offering a representative structure which diverse data systems can link up to. By representing our knowledge about domains through classes and the relations between them, ontologies can also be used to improve information retrieval and discovery from databases.
When an ontology is limited to representing entities from a specific subject or domain, it is called a domain ontology. An upper-level ontology (or top-level ontology) represents entities at a highly general level of abstraction. The classes and relations of an upper-level ontology are applicable to many different domain ontologies. Criteria to count as an upper level ontology are defined by ISO/IEC 21838-1:2021. Some examples of upper-level ontologies include Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE), and TUpper. There are also mid-level ontologies, which define terms that are used in different domains and are less general than those in upper-level ontologies, which they extend from and conform to, such as the Common Core Ontologies.