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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On Monday, we posed a situation in which a designer was trapped between fulfilling a client imperative ("help us sell more of this drug") and an ethical imperative (to let readers know about the risks associated with that drug). Most of us, when faced with that situation, will intuitively want to advocate for a middle road.

Middle roads, while famously intuitively satisfying (at least to people like us, reared on the indisputability of certain democratic ideals), rarely turn out as well as we expect them to.

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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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