Blogless

I argued on Monday that since we are more complex agents than the rules of our professions dictate, extrinsic ethical concerns can be relevant to our professional practices. Today, I want to show that our practices, merely by virtue of taking place in a context of ethically-bound agents, and having these same agents as participants, develop internal ethical criteria.

I won’t spend much time on baseball, preferring instead to bring the discussion back home to design, but I will talk briefly about one case where baseball imported extrinsic ethical concerns into its internal rules. I am of course referring to the controversy surrounding performance-enhancing drugs.

For most of Major League Baseball history, steroids were not a major issue. However, after the BALCO scandal, which involved allegations that top players had used illegal performance-enhancing drugs, the MLB internally legislated harsher penalties for steroid users. The new policy, widely accepted by players and owners, was issued at the start of the 2005 season. Why is this relevant? Because it is an example of an extrinsic moral intuition (one should not cheat) becoming a practice rule (a rule internal to the practice or game of baseball). We should at this point ask ourselves why this happens.

Baseball instituted a drug testing policy, I would argue, because the rampant cheating jeopardized the value of baseball in the minds of its spectatorial agents. Keep that in mind; I’ll return to it momentarily. Now, if design is primarily a commercial practice, we can say that a virtue of a design is that it is persuasive, or that it entices consumers to purchase itself or some product to which it owes its existence (e.g. in the case of an ad). A design that is highly persuasive is like a baseball player with a high batting average, or a low ERA.

I have previously suggested that there are good practical reasons for designers to adopt ethical persuasion techniques (i.e. they work better). I now contend that the the fact that these techniques work better is itself good evidence for the belief that design as a practice has some kind of internal ethical norms. In other words, the collective fate of Joe Camel and Toucan Sam should persuade us not merely that ethics happen to work for some other design goals and so designers should employ them, but, more strongly, that ethics are in themselves an end of design. This is the case for the same reason the MLB needed steroid legislation: merely by failing to legislate against normatively unacceptable behavior, a given practice jeopardizes its own perceived value, and thus its efficacy and even its continued existence.

In short, if baldly unethical designs fail to succeed, then there is at least a minimal ethical standard inherent in the requirements for a good design. Unethical designs, then, are to some extent simply bad design. I’ll cash all these chips in on Friday.