Sophisticated realists, uncompromising positivists, and postmodernists created much of the law in the last century. Judges, lawyers, and philosophers now are continuing to clarify, improve, and use the law. The law is often clear. But it can be indeterminate because it is indefinite, indistinct, or vague. Two examples are provided.

Virtually all elements of society seem, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, to be beset by economic importunity. Other values are eclipsed by the proclaimed necessity to run every activity and organization as a business and the relentless commercialization of human life and politics. Nowhere is this economic inexorabilitymore apparent than in professional sports, where ‘professional’ does not refer to a person whose advanced education and cultivated skills are used to serve others, but simply designates someone who makes a living as an athlete. Indeed, the distinction between professional and amateur, once so robust that it was used to strip medals from athletes who took money, has become obsolete. Nowadays athletes lose medals only when they are caught taking drugs. Salaries in professional sports have become uncoupled from performance, as familiar headlines about journeyman major league baseball players signing million dollar contracts demonstrate. Legitimate ‘stars’ (or ‘superstars’ as they have come to be known as the rhetoric inflates accordingly) demand to renegotiate their contracts when they have had an impressive year but are silent when their numbers fall. And virtually every piece of visible attire an athlete wears is marketed, by name or by number.

Applied ethics is at a watershed. In all its domains a gulf between the theory of applied ethics and the practice of applied ethics is now being recognized. In medical ethics, for example, it has been observed that “practicing clinicians often feel let down by bioethics.” The disappointment of clinicians is attributed in part to their own unrealistic expectations but is also said to be a function of

the extent to which bioethics as a discipline doesn't seem to be in possession of the realities of practice. Bioethicists tend to leave the “facts” of clinical medicine to the doctors; their task is then to apply elegant and compelling arguments drawn from first principles of ethics … to these undisputed and indisputable facts. Unfortunately, when the relationship between clinical medicine and bioethics is conceived … [in this way], the result is a very sterile discourse.