Etica oggi: voce del verbo "applicarsi"

The relationship between fundamental ethics and applied ethics, with its baggage of concrete normative and mediations, calls for a virtuous circularity between the primacy of good and that of right in order to of- fer answers that take into account complex data, essential principles, and not only immediate consequences. A reductionism that swaps the part with the whole and a holism that exchanges the whole with the part are likely to complicate the problems, until they become insoluble, when these approaches tend to be absolutized. Applied ethics becomes autonomous and separate from general ethics. We are no longer able to correlate application issues and foundation questions using arguments. The dangers of a “double ethics” are lurking in a rather evident way: the more the shared ethos is tarnished and dissol- ved, the more the formal loyalty to a code of ethics can feed attitudes of moral Pharisaism. As applied ethics must always remember the reasons of experience, in the same way fundamental ethics must always keep in mind the value of re ection, not replaceable from some quick manual of “instructions”. Critical arguments, not ideological prejudices, are useful.