Here's what I wrote on Monday:

Philosophical virtue ethics typically concern themselves with the inner states of individuals - an action counts as good because the agent who brings it about was motivated by a virtuous motivation. The analog of this is for design is the idea that a(n object of) design would count as good if the designer made her design choices in a virtuous way. I think that there is a perfectly reasonable concern about the applicability of this ethical model to design for the precise reason that designs and actions have very different ontological statuses.

Today, I'm going to articulate that difference, and illustrate it with one of the design virtues nearest and dearest to DLB's heart: economy.

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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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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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