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Introduction

In the past few months, Nick and I have progressively begun to investigate design ethics. So far, we’ve been picking out instances where you can see (or significantly fail to see) ethical concerns being addressed by designed objects, and drawing a handful of platitude-like design maxims out of these particulars.

However, it has long been our goal to start systematizing some of this Internet research into a slightly more formal framework for a design ethics, and, I realized, there’s no time like the present to get started.

While Nick is working on his PhD in design and architecture, I come from an academic background in philosophy. This means that our vocabularies aren’t precisely in sync, which is what motivated this, the first in an ongoing series of posts where we attempt to define our terms. End introduction; caveat lector.

Design Ethics Dictionary, Day 1: Consequentialism & Deontology

On Saturday, I gave you something to ponder in the form of a design ethics dilemma. Your answers to those questions are a prelude to today’s entries in the new DLB design ethics dictionary.

Illustration: "El Marchador del Amor" by Sonia Pulido.

Any time you assert something about design ethics (i.e. “Designing a car with a 36,000 mile warranty and a transmission that statistically requires an overhaul at 36,200 miles is not ethical.”) you’re presupposing a handful of things. For example, you’re supposing that you have the right to make an assessment about what is and is not ethical about a design, you’re supposing that the beliefs that you use to bolster such an assumption are correct, and so on.

One of most fundamental presuppositions of these kind of assertions, I think, is a belief in culpability: The reason design ethics exists in the first place is because we’ve all agreed to hold each other accountable for our choices. The fact that many times corporations seem to get away with making choices that we see as unethical does not undermine this fact; in fact it underlines it. By believing that a design or a company can be ethical or unethical at all, you are subscribing to a underlying framework of culpability.

In the field of philosophical ethics, there are, generally speaking, two types of ethical theories — consequentialist ones and deontological ones — and their difference has to do with how each thinks culpability works. Consequentialist ethical theories, while they may disagree on many things among themselves, are unified by the fact that they believe that actions and/or intentions are to be morally assessed entirely by reference to the states of affairs they bring about. Meanwhile, deontological ethical theories of all stripes believe that the ends don’t always justify the means, so to speak, that some choices are morally forbidden regardless of their results.

One of the traditional weaknesses with which consequentialist theories are charged is that they seem to permit acts that we tend to think of as quite immoral. One of the traditional charges levvied against deontological theories, on the other hand, is the seeming irrationality of the possibility of our having moral duties or permissions to make the world morally worse. While both of these have been addressed in deep ways by philosophers from both camps, they’ve already provided all the grist I needed for the last weekend’s ponderable.

A party-line consequentialist, depending on her value scales, might think that your design was bad, quite simply because it caused something bad to happen. On the other hand, there might be some deontologists might think that your design was ethically good, because your good intentions, rather than their specific consequences, are the site by which your design should be assessed. Your answer from Saturday should tell you something about your ethical leanings. On Wednesday, I’ll finally get around to what my answer tells me. Tune in then!