What is Practical Ethics?
Dennis F. Thompson, founding Director of the Ethics Center From Ethics at Harvard, 1987-2007, published in celebration of the Center’s 20th anniversary The Center has advocated neither a particular doctrine of ethics nor an exclusive approach to the subject. The diversity of the various methods and disciplines on which we draw and the range of the social and intellectual purposes we serve are too great to permit an orthodoxy to develop. Yet, as a result of our discussions and publications during these past two decades, it has become clear that there is a distinctive activity – what we have come to call practical ethics – that merits serious curricular and scholarly attention in the modern university, alongside the traditional disciplines in arts and sciences and in the professional schools. Three characteristics of practical ethics are significant. First, practical ethics is a linking discipline, seeking to bridge theory and practice. But it differs from both applied ethics and profess
