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.

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