 We have briefly reviewed the variety of tasks and problems to which bioethics addresses itself. But we should also briefly examine the ways in which bioethics, and its broader cousin applied ethics, is and has been conceptualized. Such an examination is important within the context of this entry in that questions about the nature of applied ethics are often implicitly questions about the relation between the theoretical and the applied, or between “theory” and “practice”. The very term applied ethics suggests that the discipline involves an application of some sort or other moral theory to the practical problem or question at hand. Arthur Caplan writes that many contributors to the field of bioethics take applied ethics to involve the application of existing theories and principles to moral problem in medicine (Caplan 1980: 25–26). But what does it mean to apply an existing theory to a practical problem? How easily can the distinction between applied ethics and ethical theory be sustained? As it turns out, many say that the field of applied ethics cannot be what the name would lead us to suppose it is.