The application of ethical theories to issues of human life and death and non-human life and death, including theft, lying, deception, war and the use of computer-generated or virtual life.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to apply the studied ethical theories to concrete issues: theft, lying and deception, war, and the use of computer-generated or virtual life. You must show how each theory reaches a verdict and weigh which gives the most convincing guidance.

Theft, lying and deception

By contrast, utilitarianism permits lying or theft when it produces greater overall happiness (Bentham's calculus weighs the consequences of each act), and situation ethics permits them where agape requires it, since for Fletcher people come before rules. Virtue ethics asks whether honesty is the virtuous mean in the situation, recognising that truthfulness is a virtue but that a virtuous person does not assist a murderer. The classic test case is Kant's inquiring murderer: a killer asks where your friend is hiding, and Kant's refusal to permit even this protective lie is widely seen as the breaking point of his absolutism, where utilitarianism and situation ethics give the more humane answer.

War

Pacifism comes in forms: absolute pacifism rejects all violence on principle (often citing the Sermon on the Mount), while contingent or "nuclear" pacifism rejects war only because modern weapons cannot meet the conditions of discrimination and proportionality. Utilitarianism weighs the total suffering and benefit, so it could justify a war (or even a pre-emptive strike) that minimises overall harm, but is vulnerable to the uncertainty of predicting outcomes. Natural law and mainstream Christian thought support a limited just war that protects innocent life and order while forbidding the direct killing of non-combatants. The Just War tradition is often criticised as either too permissive (it can be used to dress up aggression) or, in the nuclear age, effectively unsatisfiable.

Computer-generated and virtual life

Modern AQA applications include simulated killing in video games and films and the status of artificial or virtual agents. The debate asks whether virtual harm has moral weight. Virtue ethics gives the sharpest worry: repeatedly practising simulated cruelty may corrupt character and dispositions even though no real person is harmed, because we become what we habitually do. Kant focuses on whether real persons (actors, other players) are treated merely as means, and on the maxim being acted on. Utilitarianism asks only whether real-world harm or benefit results, so it tends to permit simulated killing unless it can be shown to cause real aggression, which the evidence is inconclusive about. A further question is whether a sufficiently advanced artificial agent could itself acquire moral status and so become a possible victim. The exam point is to show each theory's distinct reasoning rather than asserting that simulated killing is obviously fine or obviously wrong.