 Stephen Toulmin, in his well-known paper “The Tyranny of Principles”, recounts his experience on the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research (Toulmin 1981). Agreement amongst members of the commission was relatively easy to reach even on difficult cases, even in the face of thoroughgoing moral theoretical disagreement amongst members. His main point in the paper is not to directly address the nature of applied ethics, but to argue for a regaining of what he calls the “ethics of discretion”, calling into question the role of moral principles. En route, though, he undermines the application model of applied ethics, through his discussion of how much agreement on practical problems there can be among theorists of radically different stripes. According to Toulmin, this shows us that applied ethics is not a matter of applying a theory to a problem, in that there can be agreement on how to resolve a practical issue amongst those who strongly disagree on which moral theory ought to prevail. Again, we have an emphasis upon a lack of reproduction of theoretical disagreement in dealing with issues in practical ethics. One might question whether such agreement on particular cases paired with theoretical disagreement shows that the applied model ought to be abandoned. Nevertheless, Toulmin’s experience prompted him to wonder what final appeals to principles really achieved.