Ethical Design Intelligence

The Virtuous Designer

Philippe d'Anjou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429648083
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Ethical Design Intelligence: The Virtuous Designer explores the deep significance of philosophy and ethics to the practice of design. It offers designers from disciplines such as architecture, urban design, planning, landscape, interior, and industrial design an alternative ethical framework in which to expand their thinking about their practice.

Arguing that design today is primarily an agency driven by the momentum of globalization, embedded in economy, materialism, and utility, the book reconceptualizes the notion of virtue in design practice. Across chapters covering topics such as virtuous character, creative agency, and unsustainable practices, the book scrutinizes design through a philosophical lens.

d'Anjou dissects articulations from different philosophical thinkers from antiquity to contemporary time to reveal that ethics is fundamental to everything affected by design. Countering well-established modes of postmodern relativism in design, which has led to "defuturing" and "unsustainability," ethical realism is presented as an alternative solution. This book is written for designers, educators, researchers, and students.

1
Virtue design

Facing ethical questioning beyond blind obedience to codes and regulations in current design practice can put designers in an uncomfortable existential position. Indeed, given the postmodern nature of the current design culture, there seems to be no solid and clear ethical benchmarks to guide design practice conduct. This can be addressed from some perennial and fundamental philosophical concepts. Two concepts in ancient philosophy, virtue and character, offer substantial building material for rethinking design practice within the perspective of a more comprehensive and significant ethical design intelligence.

The idea that humans ought to act in a virtuous manner if they want to achieve harmony in life, at both individual and social levels, can be traced back to ancient philosophies. Accordingly, the practice of virtues is the condition for achieving comprehensive well-being, fulfillment, or happiness. What is then most meaningful for designers as a world-creating, -shaping, and -transforming agency is to practice and cultivate virtue design for both oneself and others. Designers have to understand that design is not a self-centered and ego-driven endeavor but an ethically engaged action that shapes human lives and therefore our being-in-the-world. Aristotle points to the fact that we are fundamentally social beings and, as such, living a good life cannot be separated from living a life that is also good for all the members of the group of which one is a part. Designers, and the public at large, should thus consider viewing design as a common effort in which we are all engaged.

Ethics has multiple definitions; in the contemporary discussion concerning ethics, what accounts for ethics is framed by several concepts and developed in a diversity of theoretical trends. Some of the most significant ethical theories go back in history as far as 400 years before our era. It was in Greece, at that time, that Aristotle developed one of the most influential ethical philosophies, called virtue ethics. Ethics is, for Aristotle, political in essence and relates to the larger human group (i.e. the community). An Aristotelian virtue approach in design shows that the ensuing design ethics is not only about large-scale problems such as sustainability, resources, social justice, and so on but is equally about the everyday practices of designers at all levels and in all aspects of design.

Even if Aristotle’s ethics was developed in a different time and society from ours, the questions that he brings into consideration are more than relevant for contemporary design ethics. In this regard, virtue design ethics rests on two essential aspects. The first one is that design ethics is concerned with the issue of design practice in terms of its teleological nature, or its purpose. Thus, in order to know what is good, designers need to know what constitutes the ultimate Good; indeed, what makes it possible for designers to achieve their ultimate goal, which is the Good, is what is good. This represents a teleological design ethics, which centers on the telos (end) of design practice. This means that all design practice aims at some end, and such an end is what Aristotle calls the Good. The second essential aspect of an Aristotelian virtue design ethics is that happiness is what constitutes the end of design practice. According to Aristotle, happiness is what humans strive for, and the question regarding the meaning of happiness is at the core of Aristotle’s virtue ethics.

In Aristotle’s view, addressing ethics as such offers a way to comprehend ethics. Thus, virtue design should be practiced according to what is good in order to achieve happiness. This appears to be quite simple and obvious until we define what happiness means in Aristotelian virtue ethics terms. Accordingly, design ethics cannot be conceptualized from an abstract idea of the Good, but rather it has to be based on the factuality of the everyday practice in the concrete world we inhabit. This ensues from Aristotle’s conceptualization of knowledge. Aristotle conceives science as an endeavor rooted in reason. Through reason, phenomena are observed and understood by means of inference of causality and analysis between the phenomena. In that sense, science pertains to the necessary, which means that there is always a causal link between things, and one cause invariably produces a similar outcome; this constitutes the foundation of science. Ethics though belongs to a different domain since it is concerned with contingency. As such, the truth is relative to each person, which means that certitude is ethically impossible; ethics then is relative approximations. Consequently, ethics and science cannot be apprehended in the same way since ethics does not have any scientific ground. This is why any designer’s choice and action in design practice beyond codes, regulations, and laws hit the wall of ethical uncertainty. Thus, from an Aristotelian viewpoint, in order to establish what the Good consists of, designers have to guess, roughly estimate, try something and make mistakes, knowing that the good is relative to each person. Design ethics, then, is by no means scientific and grounded in a knowledge of truths. It is neither art nor technique, since these aim at producing artifacts and involve expertise and skills; ethics is not about producing things or artifacts; the quality of what is designed is not judged on the basis of the product itself but on the basis of the individual who brings it into being in terms of whether one is a good person or not. There lies the fundamental difference between art or technique and ethics. Aristotle’s ground for establishing ethics is the recognition that ethics does not pertain to the domains of science, expertise, art, and technique; human action is the only concern of ethics. Virtue design ethics is thus concerned with how design practice is conducted in terms of the Good instead of speculation.

Conceptualizing design ethics within Aristotle’s philosophy of virtue implies the recognition of the teleological nature of design practice. Design ethics as such has an end and a purpose, which is eudemonistic. Aristotle’s virtue ethics is defined inductively and dialectically, and it is situated in concrete reality. This means that designers have to consider things that appear to be mutually exclusive but might, when looked at holistically with all the contradictions involved, reveal something significant. An architect might say that their goal is to become a worldly famous architect. According to Aristotle, such a statement is not reasoned; it is only an opinion or conviction, meaning that the goal of being an architect is to become famous. Such convictions are common and include the idea that happiness is indulgence, or money, or something else. This is not what Aristotle’s virtue ethics stands for; here happiness means something utterly different. The dialectical process that Aristotle’s virtue ethics embodies tries to keep what is valuable as truths in each of the different beliefs and opinions.

Whenever designers engage in design practice, it always embeds a purpose, and the architect is not wrong to want to become famous by means of their architecture practice. Anytime designers undertake design practice, they have some particular goal in view. Thus, an architect might want fame, profit, status, improved living conditions, merely to make a living, and so on. Then why would the architect want such and such things? For another end, for instance, social recognition or career. There is a goal or a purpose in all aspects of design practice, and these goals are interrelated. This is what Aristotle calls “architectonics,” which means that each illustration of the Good relates or links to another. Happiness, the ultimate Good, is a Good that has no other good than itself to which to relate. The architect who believes that fame is the purpose of their practice is wrong, because fame is only a subgoal; it is a means to some end. Fame allows the architect to be acclaimed and, as such, cannot represent the ultimate end. Yet, the approach to happiness has to account for the contingencies of the reality of design practice. Designers have to content themselves with practicing with the uncertainties of design. In this regard, Aristotle’s philosophy of virtue provides an effective means to avoid idealistic and dogmatic ethical systems. We have to keep in mind, though, that what does not amount to the Good in the practice of design, such as pleasure, health, money, fame, and so on, is still needed for achieving a fulfilling practice and beyond.

In order to define the Good, or happiness, in design in terms of Aristotelian virtue ethics, we need to understand what is particular to humans. According to Aristotle, humans have the unique capacity to choose their existence, that is, to choose and establish the purpose of their life and strive for it. Only humans can choose. Consequently, the Good, or happiness, has to relate to the rational dimension of the human soul, the dimension that is capable of prudence, rationality, and practicality in tune with reason. Therefore, the goal for designers is to practice design with reason. Aristotle says:

may we likewise ascribe to a human being some function apart from all of these? … What, then, could this be? For living is apparently shared with plants, but what we are looking for is the special function of a human being; hence we should set aside the life of nutrition and growth. The life next in order is some sort of life of sense perception; but this too is apparently shared with horse, ox, and every animal…. The remaining possibility, then, is some sort of life of action of the [part of the soul] that has reason. One [part] of it has reason as obeying reason; the other has it as itself having reason and thinking. Moreover, life is also spoken of in two ways [as capacity and as activity], and we must take [a human being’s special function to be] life as activity, since this seems to be called life more fully. We have found, then, that the human function is activity of the soul in accord with reason or requiring reason.¹

Hence, the goal is for reason to guide designers in their practice; but a practice they choose and that suits them, and that expresses their individual pursuit of happiness.

Achieving happiness by the practice of virtues is at the heart of Aristotle’s ethical theory. To practice virtues means, for Aristotle, to persistently act in a way that makes it possible for humans to achieve their optimum potential. But practicing virtues is an existential state of being, and, as such, designers are to manifest virtues, like prudence and wisdom, for instance, not only in design practice but also holistically in their everyday life.

Considering design from the standpoint of Aristotle’s ethical philosophy, which means that design thinking and practice stem from virtue, implies that design can achieve the highest ethical level throughout the whole spectrum of design practice through virtuous designers. Thus, such designers practicing virtue set the ground for an ethical design culture. It also means that designers are to engage with the very essential existential aim of knowing oneself. They have to face the fact that there is a substantial difference between merely practicing design and practicing design well. It is by intentionally opting for excellence in design practice that virtue takes place. Designers reveal virtue when they choose to cultivate their talents and abilities in terms of affect and cognition. Thus, designers are in a strategic position where virtue is disclosed through enabling people to achieve human excellence by means of how they practice design and what they design (i.e. the designed). Designers are not always aware that they are, in essence, responsible for that.

Aristotle sees that most human endeavors point to what he calls the good. He says:

Every craft and every line of inquiry, and likewise every action and decision, seems to seek some good; that is why some people were right to describe the good as what everything seeks.²

He asserts that happiness is the goal of all human actions. For Aristotle, happiness does not mean feeling or sentiment, momentary indulgence or satisfaction of wants and desires. Rather it concerns the excellence that is particular to humans as such, which is virtue.

First, our account agrees with those who say happiness is virtue [in general] or some [particular] virtue; for activity in accord with virtue is proper to virtue. Presumably, though, it matters quite a bit whether we suppose that the best good consists in possessing or in using – that is to say, in a state or in an activity [that actualizes the state]. For someone may be in a state that achieves no good – if, for instance, he is asleep or inactive in some other way – but this cannot be true of the activity; for it will necessarily act and act well. And just as Olympic prizes are not for the finest and strongest, but for the contestants – since it is only these who win – the same is true in life; among the fine and good people, only those who act correctly win the prize.³

This refers to the Greek concept of eudaimonia, a central idea in Aristotle’s ethics, which means that any human capability, like design practice, should aim at being used rightly. Eudaimonia is linked to how we act in all aspects of existence. Hence, to practice design is to act according to what constitutes the ultimate goal of being a human among humans. The designer’s choices and actions always aim at achieving an end. Ends can be seen as a series of embedded ends. One end aims at achieving another one and so on until some ultimate end that does not aim at something other than itself. Aristotle states that this ultimate end is the good life, which we pursue for its own sake. In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says this:

Suppose, then, that the things achievable by action have some end that we wish for because of itself, and because of which we wish for the other things, and that we do not choose everything because of something else for if we do, it will go on without limit, so that desire will prove to be empty and futile. Clearly, this end will be the good, that is to say, the best good…. Then does knowledge of this good carry great weight for [our] way of life, and would it make us better able, like archers who have a target to aim at, to hit the right mark?⁴

Since choices and actions aim at this, the meaning of happiness is at the core of the ethical considerations.

Aristotle understands happiness in relation to one important aspect of life: humans exist only within the dynamics of groups; humans embed both the social and the political. They are naturally disposed to be like that, and happiness can happen only if a person is connected to others. In design, such a connection between designers and the others, socially and politically, takes place in the design action, the design project, and the designed. Thus, well-being ensues from having a practice that is harmonious and responsive within a group, a community, or a society in which mutual interdependency is acknowledged. In order to be complete, design practitioners need to practice socially. Thus:

We thus see that the city exists by nature and that it is prior to the individual. For if the individual is not self-sufficient when he is isolated he will stand in the same relation to the whole as other parts do to their wholes. The man who is isolated, who is unable to share in the benefits of political association, or has no need to share because he is already self-sufficient, is no part of the city, and must therefore be either a beast or a god. There is therefore a natural impulse in all men towards an association of this sort. But the man who first constructed such an association was none the less the greatest of benefactors. Man, when perfected, is the best of animals; but if he be isolated from law and justice he is the worst of all.⁵

For designers to be virtuous implies that the human capability to reason be used to help people, groups, communities, and beyond. By looking into what Aristotle says about philosophy and politics, we can understand what this means for virtue in design.

Philosophy and politics are activities that are exclusively human. They occupy the highest position due to their abstract level of reflection. For Aristotle, philosophy concerns a wide range of disciplines such as arts, sciences, and professions; politics concerns not only the ones officially representing the p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Virtue design
• 2 On freedom in design
• 3 The art of design
• 4 Virtue design beyond designers
• 5 Intangible ethicality
• 6 Design and unsustainability
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index