Applied ethics is a field of ethics that deals with ethical questions specific to a professional, disciplinary, or practical field. Subsets of applied ethics include medical ethics, bioethics, business ethics, legal ethics, and others.
Many analytic philosophers did not focus on normative or practical ethical questions during the early part of the twentieth century. However, throughout the century various issues such as pollution, human rights abuses, abortion, human cloning, poverty, and others raised pressing ethical questions and applied ethics became an increasingly important field of philosophy.