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Nick made a great point last week, when he suggested that “aesthetics and usability are not good enough.” Today, I’d like to continue this suggestion. I hope to show why ethical concerns are supervene on the standard concerns of design practice (aesthetics, usability), whether we choose to acknowledge them or not. By way of analogy, I’ve concocted two situations for a fictitious professional baseball player, Gerald. Gerald is the starting pitcher in tonight’s game, which is of no particular significance to his team’s season.

The baseball examples are in honor of the American philosopher John Rawls, whose pioneering essay Two concepts of rules gives this discussion much of its shape.

Maximizing Value

Imagine that Gerald is approached by a person previously unknown to him, called Michael. Michael informs Gerald that he is the personal aid to the president of a major American steel mill, and shows him his card. He tells Gerald he has discovered that his employer has bet the company’s entire payroll against Gerald’s team winning the game. This means that should they win, several hundred workers will go without pay that month, a fact that may have potentially devastating life consequences for them.

A Personal Project

Imagine now that Gerald is approached by his ailing father, John. John informs his son that he is in debt to a dangerous bookkeeper for much more money than he can afford to pay. If he fails to pay, he says, surely he will be violently assaulted. His last hope, John tells Gerald, is to bet on a baseball game that Gerald plays tonight, and to ask Gerald to do his best to ensure that his team fails to beat the spread. Gerald has no reason to disbelieve his father, or to imagine that he is exaggerating the consequences of non-payment.

Agent Roles

Very clearly, the problem in both of these situations is “meta-baseball”, so to speak. What I mean is this: Gerald is a pitcher in the game of baseball, whose rules are unambiguous about the fact that the correct course of action for Gerald to take is to attempt to make an out of each batter he faces. However, Gerald is not merely a baseball agent, he is also a human agent. While the rules of baseball make the correct course of action quite clear, Gerald nevertheless has the choice as to whether to adopt those rules as guidelines for his action, even as he plays baseball.

This choice, which comes packaged with our particular kind of agency and society, is an ethical one. Since our professional dictates for action never fully constitute our rules as human agents, we are sometimes forced to make professional decisions based on rules that come from outside of those our professions specify. For example, for ethical reasons.

Integrity vs. Utility

Wherever you land on what Gerald should do in either of the cases described above, you are making an assesment about the relative values of an agent’s personal integrity and of larger social utility. In both cases, you might argue that Gerald is not responsible for the situation, and therefore has a duty to maintain his integrity as a baseball player in spite of the consequences. After all, perhaps Gerald’s team will lose regardless of whether Gerald sabotages them. Likewise, you might maintain that whatever Gerald’s integrity is worth, it is not worth fiscal despair to hundreds of people, nor is it worth physical harm to a person close to Gerald.

The point is, whatever you maintain, that Gerald’s decision about whether he should attempt to make outs or not is not as clear cut as the rules of baseball suggest. This means that regardless of whether the game of baseball has an an internal ethical component, ethical concerns for baseball players can and do exist.

How you play the game

“That’s all well and good,” you may say. “There are obvious extrinsic ethical concerns to the game of baseball, but that doesn’t mean that there needs to be a field of baseball ethics proper.” How right you are. But of course baseball must have an internal ethical component as well. And even more so design. I’ll look at why on Wednesday, and wrap up this analogy.