Blogless

It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post that directly addressed the theory of design ethics here at BlogLESS. I’ve looked at a quite a few particular cases recently, sort of idling as I took some time to think about what to do next. I think that one can usefully break the “story so far” into three distinctive threads or groups of posts.

1. An argument about why businesses should be practically motivated to engage in ethical business practice. (Why? Because the Internet tends to make their failures on this score highly transparent, which can have disastrous effects). Call this inaugural argument Why be ethical?
2. An argument starting from the observation that both designers and their clients live or die on consumer trust. This fact plus the facts of (1), I claimed, imply that both businesses and designers should be practically motivated to be honest in their advertising. Call that one Trust and Promises.
3. An uncollected third argument (mostly in March of 2009) that was meant to explore the question of what a theory of design ethics might look like. This argument may have brought out some interesting points about consequentialism, justice and design virtue, but it stopped short of a positive conclusion.

I’ve decided that I’m going to abandon (3), and instead pick up on a fourth thread. The reason I’m doing this is that I’m concerned that (3) is an unproductive line of inquiry at the moment, especially to the extent that it builds on intuitions shaped by the conclusions of (2).

Detail from Escape, by Amy Bennett

Why would those be a problem? Simply, even if the conclusions of (2) are valid, they seem to suggest a framework for reasoning about design ethics that’s probably not capable of addressing all intuitively valid instances of unethical design. In other words, there’s reason to believe that dishonest advertising is just one class of unethical design. Moreover, there’s reason to believe that the features of that class are not shared uniformly among all other relevant classes. We’ve got to step back and cast a wider net.

I realized this recently, when I was thinking about misogyny. Most of us will recognize that advertising misogyny is wrong. However, it also seems intuitively clear that it’s not wrong mostly because of its (dis)honesty. Rather what strikes us as so offensive is that it’s discriminatory, demeaning, or whatever else. This means — assuming that discrimination et. al. don’t somehow collapse into dishonesty, and I don’t that think they do — our theory has got to somehow be able to deal with these values or vices on their own terms.

I’ll start articulating a new approach on Wednesday.