Applied Philosophy II: Medical, Professional, Media and Legal Ethics, and Philosophical Counselling

• Euthanasia is classified as active (causing death, as by lethal injection) or passive (withholding or withdrawing treatment), and as voluntary, non-voluntary (the patient cannot consent) or involuntary (against the patient's wishes). James Rachels ("Active and Passive Euthanasia", 1975) argued, with his case of Smith and Jones, that there is no morally important difference between killing and letting die. Defenders of the distinction appeal to the doctrine of double effect, and opponents of legalisation to the sanctity of life and to slippery-slope arguments. In India the Supreme Court permitted passive euthanasia with safeguards in Aruna Shanbaug (2011) and recognised living wills (advance directives) in Common Cause v Union of India (2018).
• Female infanticide and sex-selective abortion: the killing of girl children, and the selective abortion of female fetuses made possible by prenatal sex determination, are driven by son preference and have produced skewed sex ratios; Amartya Sen's essay "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing" (1990) brought the scale to wide attention. The ethical analysis is one of discrimination and gender justice: the practice treats being female as a reason for death. The Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act (1994, amended 2003) prohibits sex selection in India. The case also shows that the defence of abortion by reproductive choice is not a defence of every reason for abortion.

Professional ethics concerns the obligations that come with specialised roles. In business, the central debate on corporate governance and ethical responsibility is between the shareholder view, stated by Milton Friedman ("The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits", 1970), that managers' duty is to maximise profit within the law and ethical custom, and the stakeholder view, developed by R. Edward Freeman (Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach, 1984), that a firm must balance the interests of all who are affected: employees, customers, suppliers, communities and the environment. Corporate governance addresses the accountability of managers to owners and to society (the Cadbury Report, 1992, in Britain); related issues are conflicts of interest, codes of conduct and whistle-blowing. India's Companies Act, 2013 (section 135) requires companies above certain thresholds to spend on corporate social responsibility.

• Privacy: Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis's "The Right to Privacy" (1890) defined it as "the right to be let alone", prompted by intrusive photography and newspapers. Media ethics weighs privacy against the public interest, distinguishing what is of legitimate public concern from what merely interests the public. In India, Justice K. S. Puttaswamy v Union of India (2017) held privacy to be a fundamental right.
• Cyberspace raises questions of anonymity and accountability, hate speech, misinformation, online harassment, surveillance and the power of platforms over speech; the older frameworks of press ethics (truthfulness, harm-minimisation, independence, accountability) are being extended to users and algorithms.
• Pornography: the liberal position, from Mill's harm principle, holds that adults' consensual expression and consumption should be restricted only to prevent harm to others; Ronald Dworkin's "Is There a Right to Pornography?" (1981) defended a right grounded in equal concern. Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin argued that pornography is not merely speech but a practice that subordinates women and contributes to harm; others raise the exploitation of performers and the effects on minors. The debate turns on the evidence of harm and the scope of free expression.
• Representation and difference-marginalisation: media representations shape how groups are seen and see themselves (Stuart Hall's work on representation). Stereotyped, absent or distorted portrayals of women, castes, religious minorities, tribal communities, persons with disabilities and sexual minorities can reproduce marginalisation; the ethical demands are accuracy, fairness, diversity in newsrooms and giving groups a voice in how they are represented.

• Law and morality: the Wolfenden Report (1957) recommended decriminalising private homosexual conduct between consenting adults, since "there must remain a realm of private morality and immorality which is ... not the law's business". Lord Devlin (The Enforcement of Morals, 1959) replied with legal moralism: a society may use law to protect its shared morality, which holds it together. H. L. A. Hart (Law, Liberty and Morality, 1963) answered from Mill's harm principle that enforcing morality as such is unjustified, and distinguished legal paternalism (protecting people from themselves) from moralism.
• Legal obligation: is there a moral obligation to obey the law as such? Plato's Crito has Socrates refuse to escape because he has agreed to the laws and benefited from them. Later grounds include consent, fair play (those who accept the benefits of a cooperative scheme must bear its burdens: Hart, Rawls), gratitude and the natural duty to support just institutions. Philosophical anarchists such as A. John Simmons (Moral Principles and Political Obligations, 1979) argue that none of these grounds a general obligation for most citizens. Civil disobedience (Thoreau, Gandhi, Martin Luther King) is public, non-violent law-breaking on grounds of conscience with acceptance of the penalty.
• Authority and validity of law: for legal positivists, a law's validity depends on its source, not its merit, on the rule of recognition accepted by officials (Hart) or on derivation from a presupposed basic norm (Kelsen). Natural law theory holds that "an unjust law is not a law" (lex iniusta non est lex, associated with Augustine and Aquinas) or at least is law in a defective sense; Lon Fuller added eight procedural requirements of an "inner morality of law". Joseph Raz's service conception holds that authority is legitimate when following its directives helps subjects conform better to reasons that already apply to them (the normal justification thesis).

Philosophical counselling (philosophical practice) applies philosophy to the everyday problems of individuals: decisions, conflicts of values, questions of meaning, loss and relationships. Gerd Achenbach opened the first modern philosophical practice near Cologne in 1981, and Lou Marinoff's Plato, Not Prozac! (1999) popularised the movement, with his five-stage PEACE process: Problem, Emotion, Analysis, Contemplation and Equilibrium. The counsellor does not diagnose or treat mental illness but helps the client clarify concepts, examine assumptions and arguments, and articulate a coherent world-view, in the spirit of Socratic dialogue and the Hellenistic idea of philosophy as a way of life. The Gītā's dialogue, in which Kṛṣṇa helps a paralysed Arjuna think through his duty, is often cited as an Indian precedent.