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On Monday, we posed a situation in which a designer was trapped between fulfilling a client imperative (”help us sell more of this drug”) and an ethical imperative (to let readers know about the risks associated with that drug). Most of us, when faced with that situation, will intuitively want to advocate for a middle road.

Middle roads, while famously intuitively satisfying (at least to people like us, reared on the indisputability of certain democratic ideals), rarely turn out as well as we expect them to.

Take the example at hand: Imagine that a maximally client-satisfactory solution involves illegible text featured in a non-pertinent position within the ad. Now imagine that a maximally reader-satisfactory solution features legible text featured prominently on the page. The apparent middle roads thus seem to be (a) illegible text featured prominently on the page, (b) legible text hidden off in a corner somewhere, or (c) some kind of mostly-legible text featured in a semi-prominent position on the page.

Now, not only are all of these solutions just the kind of watery cruft that designers pride themselves on avoiding, none of them strike me as particularly satisfying from either the client or the reader perspective. On reflection, then, middle roads seem to have results akin to those of “committee thinking” - that is, they tend to leave everyone vaguely unsatisfied. This is just the kind of result that designers dread, and with good reason.

This is in itself a fact worth considering.

The Judgment of Solomon, by Raphael

Middle-road or design-by-committee solutions always remind me of the story of King Solomon. Here again, I think, somebody tried to split the baby in half. I know that this solution comes from a perfectly understandable impulse to partially address multiple conflicting concerns, but I can’t stand the desired result: that everyone’s a little bit happy.

Applying this type of solution to our fictitious pharmaceutical client, they still have the chance to sell their wares to a confused elderly readership, and meanwhile the more astute half of that readership will be aware of the risk. Just like Solomon’s stratagem, this has a certain logic to it, but the results are entirely unsatisfying.

For my next few posts, I’m going to look at some classical stances in philosophical ethics that claim to provide more satisfying results for dealing with a moral dilemma of this kind. Stay with me.