Two weeks ago, I wrote a post about children and advertising. The point of that post was this: we don't find it conscionable to advertise cigarettes to kids. In fact, we seem to find it so uniformly unconscionable that we're willing to make it illegal. This indicated to me that we have here a wide-spread and serious moral commitment.

Since I wrote that post, I've been thinking more about the role of children in the advertising culture, and specifically about this legislation. It seems to me that here we have a stable empirical starting point for what I hope will become our positive discussion of design ethics (following both our argument for the pragmatic role of ethics in design, our diagnosis of the trust relationship at the heart of advertising, and of advertising's pursuant follies).

That said, I think the cart has been put just slightly in front of the horse, here. While we may (or may not) have stumbled on the empirical clue for our ongoing positive discussion of design ethics, the development of this line seems to me nevertheless very tricky.

In the interest of taking design ethics seriously and getting it right, then, there are some fairly significant unanswered questions left to address. While I am convinced that I will not answer a single one of these questions definitively here on BlogLESS, I am also convinced that having some rough and ready answers will provide the kind of scaffolding we'll need to develop any serious practical principles.

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