Applied Ethics, Inc. (AE) is a nonprofit organization with the mission to seek ethical solutions to significant social issues through projects, education, counseling, and advocacy. As discussed below, currently, our primary program is an underground online school for young women in Afghanistan who have been barred from attending formal schooling based on their gender.
According to a longstanding tradition, the good is that which contributes to personal and societal flourishing and ethics is the discipline dedicated to understanding the nature of the good. Applied ethics has a functional purpose, which is to put ethical theory to work in practical domains, from medical ethics to research ethics, public health ethics, and the ethics of war, peace, and conflict resolution.
The world is full of problems and we can’t tackle them all. Our goal is to commit ourselves to those significant issues where, to the extent possible, the ethics are clear, the causes are just, and we have within our means the capacity to contribute effectively. We are dedicatedly nonsectarian and nonpartisan.
Pax Populi Academy, AE’s school for female students in Afghanistan, expands to over 110 students.
After the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021, they initiated sweeping policies to rob the country’s women and girls of basic human rights, including barring women and girls from any schooling beyond 6th grade. The country’s gender apartheid was so extreme that in July 2025, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued arrest warrants for top Taliban leaders for the crime against humanity of gender persecution. With over a decade of experience in online education in Afghanistan, we reconfigured our school to respond to the need for secondary school education for Afghan girls. Now in its third academic year, our underground school has expanded to over 110 students in grades 7 to 12. We have developed a complete curriculum modeled on international standards with courses in the humanities, math, and sciences. For more details about the catastrophic conditions for women and girls in Afghanistan and how we are responding, please see “Pax Populi Academy Develops to Meet Afghanistan’s Crisis in Female Education.” To learn more about Pax Populi generally and recent developments at Pax Populi Academy (PPA), please click here.