After all, maybe consequences aren't everything. We've certainly seen that they're difficult to quantify, and that makes it difficult to come up with an algorithm that produces intuitive and edifying results. What's worse, we're often wrong or only partially right when we try to predict the consequences of our actions.

We've also seen that for all forms of consequentialism, one's obligations to oneself and to one's family and friends are no weaker or stronger than those to strangers, a fact which seems to skew certain types of situations towards having to choose between an intuitive, non-maximally ethical conclusion or a non-intuitive, maximally ethical one.

It's also worth noting that consequentialism seems to make the somewhat confusing assumption that blameworthiness is not really a moral quality internal to an agent, but rather a function of whether or not it is societally useful to blame her. In the case of the designer who takes the job designing cigarette packaging because she needs money for her sick mother, we don't necessarily blame the agent because we hold her as particularly blameworthy in a moral sense, but rather because it is useful for us to blame her if we want to advocate against products that endanger the health of children.

Which is all to note that consequentialism might be called an agent-neutral theory. Starting next week, we'll consider an alternative theory, one that is agent-based. For now, let's call this an agent-based virtue ethics.

Detail from Rembrandt's Aristotle contemplating a bust of Homer (1653). Aristotle is commonly interpreted to have advocated a form of virtue ethics.

In our first, very rough formulation of this, we might say that a good design counts as good by virtue of the fact that it is undertaken with virtuous motivation on behalf of the designer, as well as exhibits, expresses, or promote certain design virtues.

Does this idea, which goes back to ancient Greece, help us intuitively solve the kinds of moral dilemmas we've been posing so far? That's something to think about until Monday, when we'll discuss it more.

Consider the following scenarios:

1. A designer is asked by a major soft drink manufacturing concern to create the packaging and ad campaign for their new soft drink. This drink, created from organic ingredients and without refined sugar, could supplant the role of sugary soda in many tens of thousands of peoples lives in an unhealthy America. The organic substitute has to be harvested in a poor region of South America, and if production increases to planned levels, will displace one or more small villages.
2. A designer is offered a significant sum of money to design compelling, "younger" packaging for a cigarette company. As it happens, this designer also has an ailing mother in dire need of expensive medical treatment. No alternatives for generating that level of income are apparent.

These scenarios are meant to highlight a problem with mixed-criteria maximizing.

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Last week, we suggested that by choosing an option that is just "good enough," we might be able to avoid the tough requirements of maximizing consequentialism that we were worried might be incompatible with our professional practice.

Andy Warhol, Brillo Soap Pads Boxes (1964) [Photo © Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts / ARS (New York) / SODRAC (Montréal)]

Let's think about how we might do that. Any kind of algorithm we use to determine what to do involves (1) enumerating our choices, and (2) evaluating how right each option is.

Back to the magazine ad example. Imagine that our designer must choose between design decision (A) with outcome (a), and decision (B) with outcome (b). Now imagine that (a) seems ethically more correct than (b), and that (b) entails a more desirable expected outcome for her client. A satisficing program might suggest that the designer take option (B), so long as its expected outcome (b) can be assessed as "good enough."

Now call our designer's interest in continuing to work for her client (c). What the satisficing algorithm really suggests is that (b)+(c) > (a). In other words, it is not actually satisficing at all, it's just maximizing on a mixed set of criteria. Which is to say that in the context of a design engagement, satisficing collapses back into maximizing. [Note also that in the situation where (b)+(c) < (a), the designer chooses (a), again maximizing. This is why very few designers would work on a campaign to say, sell cigarettes to kids: (a) is just bigger than (b)+(c).]

The reason why mixed criteria are a valid part of this decision (aka. why it is morally permissible for the decision to have a non-moral component) is that our evaluative algorithm [(2) above] intuitively puts choices in preference order, not in order of maximal utility. Additionally, it is clear that while moral criterion (b) + non-moral criterion (c) intuitively evaluates to a maximally preferable outcome, we can see that (a) still maintains a position of maximal ethicality.

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Imagine Jim is preparing to move and is selling his home. Imagine further that he lists his house at a price which, while perhaps not the maximum amount for which he could sell it, would be nevertheless be sufficient and satisfactory. Is this decision irrational? Is his ability to be satisfied with less than the most money he could potentially get for his house irrational?

If you can answer those questions in the negative, you subscribe to the possibility of what philosophers and economists sometimes call rational individual satisficing, that is, the idea that it is possible for a rational individual to simply have modest desires.

In the moral domain, the philosopher Michael Slote offers the following example:

A medic attending the wounded on the battlefield may attend to the first (sufficiently) badly wounded person he sees without considering whether there may be someone in even worse shape nearby, and from a common-sense moral standpoint such behavior seems perfectly acceptable.

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John Stuart Mill was an early and influential proponent of utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism is a kind of consequentialism that is classically concerned with maximizing happiness. What this means is that a course of action is considered good by utilitarian standards if its consequences provide more happiness for all the people they affect that would any other available alternative courses of action.^*

Who wouldn't want that, right? But the devil's always been in the details for utilitarianism, and this is complicated by a set of prior commitments that come with a design engagement.

Since that's what we care about here, I'll just talk about a long-standing problem for utilitarianism that's particularly relevant under the auspices of design. Namely, utilitarianism's seeming inability to account for personal projects.

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Now that we've gone back and established (at least a rough and ready version) of why ethical criteria are required when evaluating a design, and what exactly we mean when we say design, I'm sure you'll agree it's high time that we start to address what those criteria might be.

Particularly faithful readers of BlogLESS will remember our discussion of accountability in design ethics last October. The net result of that discussion was that designs should be evaluated by means of the effects they have on the world. Basically, the way we evaluate whether some design is good should depend on whether the consequences that design has on humans are positive or negative.

It should strike you as uncertain, however, how exactly we are proposing that we evaluate whether the consequences of some design are "positive" or "negative". In other words: How do we know a design is right? That's what I'm going to start thinking about this week.

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I've been thinking for a few days now about how I would respond to Paul's most recent weekend ponderable.

His question was: What if you went out of your way to design an ecologically-friendly MP3 player, but in doing so, inadvertently caused the manufacturing contract to be outsourced, costing American jobs? In short, can a design be ethical despite having unethical consequences?

Whether we design sustainably or not, our decision is going to do harm to someone. As I see it, we should choose the option which does the most good for the most people-- i.e. design the MP3 player with recycled materials because, ultimately, it's better for everyone. Being environmental, in this case, is a higher obligation.

Fair enough, but how does one do that?

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Some years back in my professional association with Nick, before BlogLESS, before DLB, we wrote a few posts together on a blog for the company where we worked at the time. It never really got its sea legs content-wise (quite unlike the uniformly polished gems you're used to dealing with here) but Nick wrote a post there that I've thought about several times since, and today it's finally time to rep it.

What he wrote was this: Design is "taking into account." What I think he meant by this is that a maximally good design takes into account and provides answers to a maximal number of factors (usability, ergonomics, ecology, aesthetics, performance, and so on).

Wylie High School by Esther Pearl Watson (via)

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