Ethics and Public Policy

This is a series of commissioned texts designed to address the question of how ethical analysis can inform the design and implementation of public policy. Each text will address a particular area of public policy. It acknowledges that although moral philosophers and jurisprudential theorists have written about public policy and legal matters, even making recommendations in their published writing about what the law and policy should be, they have rarely if ever attended to the critical matter of how such policy and law might actually be designed and put into practice in the real world. Inasmuch as the texts do take up the challenge of designing law and policy they address the important criticism often made of applied ethics texts. This that such texts restrict themselves to making normative recommendations on particular matters without examining the practical feasibility of such recommendations. The texts are intended to make a real difference by giving law and policy makers the critical tools to understand what is morally salient within their area of law and policy making.