There is currently not much consensus about how to understand the relationship between normative moral philosophy and applied or practical ethics. However, if we approach this relationship through the lens of contextual ethics this brings out three central features of problems in practical ethics that these problems are in a particular sense new, that these problems therefore appear to us as practically more urgent, and that both characteristics of their appearance arise because problems in practical ethics depend on contexts outside the everyday of moral life, not familiar or even readily accessible to everyone. To develop my suggestion, I provide a brief overview of the most influential characterisations of practical ethics and present the core commitments of a Wittgensteinian approach to contextual ethics. My aim is complex. On the one hand, I argue that focus on the context of moral problems brings out these differences between problems in practical ethics and normative moral philosophy—that problems in practical ethics appear to us as new, urgent and embedded in a specialised context—while, on the other hand, I argue that there is still no fundamental or qualitative difference between problems in the two subdisciplines—normative and practical ethics really make up one discipline. Finally, I discuss whether the specialised background of problems in practical ethics raises a tension with the Wittgensteinian emphasis on the everyday in contextual ethics.