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Here’s what I wrote on Monday:

Philosophical virtue ethics typically concern themselves with the inner states of individuals - an action counts as good because the agent who brings it about was motivated by a virtuous motivation. The analog of this is for design is the idea that a(n object of) design would count as good if the designer made her design choices in a virtuous way. I think that there is a perfectly reasonable concern about the applicability of this ethical model to design for the precise reason that designs and actions have very different ontological statuses.

Today, I’m going to articulate that difference, and illustrate it with one of the design virtues nearest and dearest to DLB’s heart: economy.

The ontological status of designs

When I say that actions and designs have different ontological statuses, what I mean is that the ways they are are operative in the world are very different. In the most casual way, designs are different from actions just because they persist. An action gets acted and then disappears, leaving behind a set of consequences which, however they are related to the original action, are not it precisely. Contrariwise, a “design” is really a schematic for an object, it gets instantiated as one or more objects that persist in the world (a website, a hundred greeting cards, ten million iPods).

This is to say that designs seem to me to be ontologically closer to being agents than they are to being actions. So when we talk about the consequences of a design, we’re really talking about the consequences of the actions it (as a series of one or more instantiated objects) enables or schematizes.

What this suggests is that there is an ambiguity when we talk about a design’s motivations. Namely, we could be talking about (a) the motivation of the designer - what kinds of actions and therefore consequences she thought her design would enable, or (b) the motivations the designed object enables in other agents who interact with it. In the case of (b), motivations are — on one view of the causal chain — themselves consequences.

This is a complex situation, and it’s one which I can’t say that I’ve thought completely through yet. (Ain’t blogging fine?) I do, however, immediately see one clear consequence. I’ll shortly address this below.

Economy

A founding premise of Design Less Better is that economy is a design virtue. We pursue this virtue seriously in our design work, and strive to fiscal, conceptual, and aesthetic economy.

Einstein’s Mass-Energy Equivalence, the furniture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and the Louisiana Purchase are famous examples of conceptual, aesthetic, and fiscal economy, respectively.

As in the case of justice, I don’t think many designers would disagree with us on that score. Given this, and continuing the similarity, I won’t attempt to persuade you that economy is indeed a virtue. Rather, I will deploy it as an example of what I see as a weakness of virtue ethics as regards designs. Namely, this: We have all encountered designs which we can see aspire to conceptual or aesthetic economy, but that we also consider failed. Thus, it seems, a designer being motivated to instantiate or promote the virtue of economy is not sufficient criteria for the success of a design.

Now imagine a design whose designer aspires to a comprehensive set of design virtues (or a set as close to comprehensive as is possible), but that succeeds at achieving none of them. Would you call this design good? I don’t think you would, and not just because of the fact that good in that sentence is overdetermined. Rather, most of us would intuitively consider such a design to be at best ethically neutral simply because of its failure to generate the desired results (in a more strictly virtue ethical parlance, to instantiate the virtues to which the designer aspired).

One might hope, then, that we could find a theory that could satisfy both the intuition that a design is good in terms of its consequences (at which virtue ethics fails) and that it can count as good if it is well-motivated (at which consequentialism fails). I can think of two candidate alternatives, and I’ll discuss the first one next.