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.

Read More...

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.

Read More...

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.