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Toward an Horizon in Design Ethics

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Abstract

This paper suggests that design ethics can be enriched by considering ethics beyond the traditional approaches of deontology, teleology, and virtue ethics. Design practice and design ethics literature tend to frame ethics in design according to these approaches. The paper argues that a fundamental and concrete ethical understanding of design ethics can also be found in Sartrean Existentialism, a philosophy centered on the individual and his/her absolute freedom. Through the analysis of four core concepts of Sartrean Existentialism that define a specific ethics, the paper illustrates why such philosophical approach is relevant to design ethics. The paper also shows how Sartrean Existentialism and its ethics apply to critical issues of professional practice in design such as professional engagement and design decision-making. The paper finally argues that Sartre’s philosophy and ethics is a perspective that offers the designer in design practice a solid ground to engage his/her ethical dilemma.

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Notes

  1. Other thinkers have contributed to Existentialism but Sartre represents the philosopher who has explicitly endorsed Existentialism and fully developed it as such.

  2. Although not from a Sartrean approach, the theoretical work of Fry (2009) in which a theoretical discourse of ethics in design is grounded in the concrete and particular lived experience of design practice is informative in that sense.

  3. The example here refers to architecture, but this can apply to most professional codes in design professions.

  4. In Journals like Business Ethics and Theoretical Medicine.

  5. See such articles in Design Philosophy Papers, a journal that addresses design theory, philosophy, and ethics.

  6. Hare (1981, p. 36) and MacIntyre (1998, p. 260) illustrate clearly two examples of that situation.

  7. This is the case with Warnock (1970, p. 125) and Howells (1988, p. 27).

  8. Warnock (1967) frames Existentialism according to four themes: nothingness, freedom, anguish, and being-in-the-world. The concept of situation in Sartre correlates the concept of being-in-the-world.

  9. Sartre borrowed the term facticity from Heidegger.

  10. The terms anguish, anxiety, and angst are commonly used in English literature. According to Polt (1999, p. 77) the terminology angst is most retained. According to Cooper (1990, p. 127) angst does not have misrepresenting meanings that words such as anguish and anxiety have, these represent something that is too commonplace for what it is meant by existentialist thinkers like Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre. In this paper I use the term anguish as found in the more official source Dictionary of Existentialism, 1999, edited by Haim Gordon.

  11. For Heidegger, the person makes that happen by immersing him/herself in the crowd.

  12. It is important to point out the fact that Heidegger has insistently refused to consider himself as an existentialist. He explicitly states it in his Letter on Humanism. Still, Heidegger plays a central role for the development of Sartre’s Existentialism, and his concept of being-in-the-world is essential to this.

  13. After WWII, Sartre starts to integrate Marxism into Existentialism. For Anderson (1993, pp. 147–160) the shift leads to two different Sartrean ethics, individualist and collective; he considers the first one as truly existentialist. Sartre’s turn to Marxism never actually arrived at a materialist understanding of ethics, i.e., the materially performative nature of things latent in Heidegger’s thinking. Also, defining an existentialist ethics means that the tension between being an individual ethics and that individuals exist in the world with others be acknowledged. The collective dimension is not exclusive of an existentialist ethics. May (1992) suggests that existentialist ethics can be applied to communities, organizations, and groups, however consciousness and choice are still an individual matter.

  14. These views appear also in the work of Kierkegaard (Warnock 1967, pp. 6–7) whose ethics discards objectivity and demands the acceptance subjectivity. In Either/Or Kierkegaard explains existence according to three spheres: aesthetic, ethical, and religious, which are organized hierarchically and embodied in subjective values. Similarly, Nietzsche approaches morality as an evolving process through history. For Nietzsche moral truth and values are not absolute, they are created and instituted by an established power in a given time. Nietzsche describes in On the Genealogy of Morals how the ethics of pride, boldness, and health, which represent the ethics of ancient nobility, is taken over by the ethics of weakness, suffering, and humility, which represent the ethics of Christianity, and which will be replaced by the ethics of science. The issue of subjectivity is easy to understand and Nietzsche’s notion of ‘herd instinct’ leading to herd morality can be found in Heidegger’s concept of they and in Sartre’s concept of bad faith.

  15. This is well illustrated by Clarkson (1996).

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Correspondence to Philippe d’Anjou.

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d’Anjou, P. Toward an Horizon in Design Ethics. Sci Eng Ethics 16, 355–370 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-009-9157-y

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