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One of the big problems we isolated last week with our consequentialist strategies was that they couldn’t seem to handle the problem of justice. Since we know that design needs ethics, and since ethics ought to be able to deliver justice, we suggested on Wednesday that consequentialism (evaluating designs in terms of their consequences) — or at least the varieties of it we’ve undertaken so far — may be the wrong approach.

The alternative approach we suggested is that a design could count is good if it instantiated or promoted some agreed-upon design virtues. I personally find something intuitively compelling in the idea that justice is a virtue of design, and thus that one necessary (although almost certainly insufficient) condition for a design to be a good design is that it exhibits, expresses, or promotes justice. I don’t expect it to be contentious that justice is desirable, so rather than argue directly that design should concern itself with justice, I’ll explain why a few advantages of the idea of trying to develop an ethical code around justice as a design virtue.

I am sure you expected that like our consequentialist solutions, an ethical code that mandates instantiating or promoting a set of design virtues (a virtue ethical code) has some distinctive advantages and some distinctive disadvantages.

On the one hand, it has the enormous practical advantage of being able to provide a code of ethics that matches up with our intuitive sense of what a good design might be (e.g., it should be just, and so on).

A particularly convenient facet of this is that virtue ethics comes packaged with the advantage of making our motivations count for something. If a design is good that promotes (e.g.) justice, there is a certain register on which the same design cannot be bad, regardless of its consequences, if the designer merely tried to make a just work. After all, when designers try to act in a just manner, this is in itself a form of promoting the virtue of justice inside the practice of design. So, apparently, virtue ethics might come with a more satisfying algorithm to determine blameworthiness than consequentialism.

Kalman’s bold design was the voice of Colors, a magazine focused on multiculturalism and global awareness, from 1990-1995.

This is due in part to an ambiguity in the idea of applying virtue ethics to design. 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. I’ll pick this thread up on Wednesday.

Finally, the notion of instantiating virtues is one to which I think many designers may naturally gravitate. I have no specific facts or arguments for this, except for the career choices of our various paragons of design ethics. For example, I think that Tibor Kalman must have subscribed to something like virtue ethics to make the choices he did.

While this last bit may not initially strike the consequentialist as particularly persuasive, it is worth considering that among those designers who produced the best consequences, many may have been trying to instantiate or promote virtues — and that is something that the consequentialist will have to take seriously.