# Admin Possible exam dates? 27th May 14th June 12th July 4th September ** # Lesson Plan: The Ethics of Design ## 7.1 Applied Ethics and Design ### Slide 1.1 - [[Design ethics]] extends beyond adhering to safety standards and regulations - Designers face ethical challenges when creating objects that enable new actions or behaviors that may conflict with existing societal norms and values ### Slide 1.2 - Key ethical values that designers must consider include: - User freedom and autonomy - Privacy and data protection - Environmental sustainability and resource conservation - Consumer choice and access - Social justice and equality ### Slide 1.3 - These ethical values often come into conflict in design contexts, forcing difficult trade-offs - Example: Maximizing functionality and efficiency may come at the cost of environmental sustainability - Example: Implementing strong security measures may compromise user privacy and freedom ### Slide 1.4 - Designers must navigate these value conflicts and make principled decisions about which values to prioritize in a given context - Technological determinism can obscure the ethical responsibilities of designers by suggesting that technological development is inevitable and outside human control ### Slide 1.5 - However, the reality is that designers and the social values they embody play a significant role in shaping which technologies are developed and how they are implemented - Designers must recognize their agency and [[moral responsibility]] in creating objects that will influence human behavior and social outcomes ### Slide 1.6 - As new technologies emerge, designers often face novel ethical challenges not fully addressed by existing codes and standards - This requires designers to engage in moral reasoning and judgment to identify and navigate potential ethical pitfalls ### Slide 1.7 - Designers must consider not only the intended uses and consequences of their creations but also potential unintended effects and misuses - Responsible design requires anticipating and mitigating risks while promoting beneficial outcomes ### Slide 1.8 - Ultimately, [[design ethics]] is about [[more than]] just avoiding harm, but also about actively promoting human values and well-being through the creation of thoughtful, socially responsible objects and systems ## 7.2 Consumerism, Needs and Wants ### Slide 2.1 - The Modernist view argues that purely functional design focused on meeting genuine needs will reduce wasteful consumerism driven by aesthetic and social desires - The Modernist view emerged in the early 20th century as a reaction against the perceived excesses and frivolities of consumer culture - Saw much of contemporary design as catering to fleeting fashions, status-seeking, and conspicuous consumption - Believed this led to wasteful use of resources on functionally superfluous or socially harmful goods - Modernists argued that "good design" should prioritize pure functionality over aesthetics or symbolism - Strip away all decorative or expressive elements to focus solely on the essential practical purpose - Rational, efficient, and honest in its dedication to solving real human problems - Reject design's use for mere fashion, market-driven novelty, or social signaling - This functionalist approach was seen as a way to realign design with genuine human needs - Focus on meeting objective requirements for subsistence, health, work, education, social cooperation, etc. - Reject pandering to subjective wants or commercially manufactured desires - Make products that are universally usable, long-lasting, and resistant to stylistic obsolescence - By focusing on needs over wants, Modernist design sought to eliminate wasteful consumerism - Undercut the business strategy of stimulating demand for the frivolous and disposable - Make products that people truly require, [[not just what]] they can be manipulated into buying - Encourage a culture of utilitarian necessity over recreational luxury - The Modernist view sees consumer freedom as a false idol that leads to social and environmental harms - The apparent range of consumer choices actually enslaves people to artificial and unhealthy desires - Truly liberated and fulfilled humans would recognize and pursue their objective needs - Designers have a responsibility to shape [[material culture]] to support genuine human flourishing - In practice, Modernist design emphasized minimalism, standardization, and timeless geometries - Rid products of all extraneous ornament to highlight their essential structure and purpose - Develop universal templates to enable cheap mass-production and broad accessibility - Favor simple, "pure" shapes and materials that honestly express [[the nature]] of [[the object]] - Famous Modernist designers and theorists include Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, and Dieter Rams - Loos' essay "Ornament and Crime" condemned decoration as primitive and wasteful - Le Corbusier called the house "a machine for living in" that should be rationally engineered - Dieter Rams' principles of good design emphasized innovation, honesty, and unobtrusiveness - While hugely influential, the Modernist view has also been criticized for its austerity and elitism - Accused of paternalistically imposing a narrow, joyless vision of "real needs" on consumers - Seen as intellectually elitist in its disdain for popular tastes and preferences - Its strong emphasis on rationality and objectivity can feel alienating and sterile - Later design movements rebelled against Modernist strictures in various ways - Postmodernism embraced eclecticism, historical reference, and symbolic play - The Memphis Group used bright colors, bold patterns, and unconventional forms - More recent participatory and human-centered design foregrounds user's felt experiences - But the core Modernist challenge remains relevant: Can design promote sustainability and human welfare without resorting to a manipulative or exploitative consumerism? How do we balance real needs with freedom and delight in design? - However, excellent designs can still be created for functions that are gratuitous or unnecessary from the perspective of objective human needs ### Slide 2.2 - To defend its view, Modernism must provide a principled way to distinguish between designs that serve valid, necessary functions and those that cater to mere wants or desires - The Modernist view rests on [[the idea]] that there's an objective distinction between genuine human needs and mere wants or preferences - Suggests that responsible designers have a duty to focus on the former and eschew the latter - This would rule out designs that cater to subjective consumer desires, even if they do so very well - But this hard distinction between needs and wants is not obviously clear or uncontroversial - In practice, the two notions are often blurred together or used interchangeably - We often speak of "needing" things that are not strict necessities for survival or basic functioning - So the Modernist view owes us a principled account of what separates real needs from mere desires - What criteria can we use to determine when something is a genuine requirement vs. an idle fancy? - Without a clear standard, [[the need]]/want distinction risks being arbitrary or question-begging - This suggests a distinction between genuine human needs and mere wants, with responsible design focused on the former ### Slide 2.3 - However, the boundary between needs and wants is contested and difficult to pin down - The terms are often used interchangeably in everyday discourse - There is no clear consensus on what constitutes a genuine need vs. a mere desire - In everyday discourse, the terms "need" and "want" are often used quite loosely and synonymously - We frequently say we "need" things that we really just strongly desire - E.g. "I need a vacation", "I need a new pair of shoes", "I need a coffee" - In these cases, "need" just seems to indicate intensity of preference, not objective necessity - So there doesn't seem to be a strong consensus on what the boundaries of "needs" are or what the term really means - People's intuitive notions of needs vary quite widely - Some reserve it for only the barest survival requisites, others use it much more broadly - This conceptual murkiness poses a challenge for drawing a hard a fast line between needs and mere wants - These don't seem to be stable, easily-delineated natural categories - Their boundaries are significantly blurred in everyday thought and talk ### Slide 2.4 - One proposed criterion is that needs are more objective than wants - For X to genuinely need Y, Y must be called for by objective features of X's situation, [[not just]] subjectively desired - Wants are purely a matter of individual preferences, while needs have an external basis - Notes - For X to genuinely need Y, Y must be an indispensable means to some essential end of X - X's survival, X's ability to function in a crucial role or capacity, etc. - X's need for Y thus isn't just a matter of X's own preferences, but is dictated by objective facts about X's nature and circumstances - E.g. a plant's need for water, a car's need for fuel, a student's need for education - Wants, by contrast, are purely subjective states of desire or liking - They vary from person to person based on individual tastes and dispositions - This idea of needs as objectively rather than subjectively grounded is intuitively appealing - It fits the thought that you can need something without wanting it, and vice versa - Suggests a way to assess need-claims as true/false based on objective facts, [[not just]] preferences - But specifying what the objective grounds of needs are proves quite tricky - What counts as an "essential end" that can underwrite objective needs? - How much room for individual variation in essential ends and indispensable means is there? ### Slide 2.5 - Another suggestion is that needs have greater moral priority or urgency than mere wants - Claims of needs carry greater normative weight and demand attention in a way that mere desires do not - "I want X" vs. "I need X" - the latter commands greater moral force - Notes - Another potential marker of genuine needs is that they seem to have greater moral priority than mere wants - If I say "I need X", that seems to entitle me to X more strongly than merely saying "I want X" - Needs generate prima facie ought-claims in a way that desires alone do not - Absent special circumstances, the fact that someone needs X means we should help them get X - Unsatisfied needs warrant concern and even intervention in a way unmet desires typically don't - So in interpersonal and policy deliberation, needs-talk seems to wield special normative force - We generally prioritize people's needs over their less essential wants - Meeting needs is often seen as a matter of justice, whereas satisfying desires is more optional - This suggests that framing something as a need amounts to [[more than]] just expressing a strong preference for it - There's an implication that the thing is not merely wanted but required in some deeper sense - But as with objectivity, this too faces [[the challenge]] of specifying what ultimately grounds the special [[moral status]] of needs vs. wants - Why exactly are needs uniquely morally pressing in a way wants are not? - Is it just because needs are more intense/urgent desires, or because they serve more essential ends? ### Slide 2.6 - However, a conception of needs based solely on basic survival requirements (food, water, shelter, etc.) is insufficient to rescue the Modernist view - Restricting "needs" to bare subsistence would limit ethically justified design to only the most rudimentary, survival-oriented objects - This is too narrow a view that would exclude many designs that seem to serve genuine, if not basic, human needs - Notes - One traditional way of distinguishing needs from wants is to equate the former with the basic requirements of biological survival - Food, water, shelter, clothing, medical care, etc. - Things without which the organism will suffer serious harm or death - This conception of needs as survival requirements fits their intuitive objectivity and moral priority - Whether you need something to live doesn't depend on whether you want it, but on physiological facts - Keeping people alive seems to be a stronger moral imperative than making them happy - But while this ultra-narrow notion of needs makes the need/want distinction sharp, it is too restrictive for the Modernist view - It would constrain "ethically justified design" to only the barest subsistence-related products - Severe minimalism of only food, clothing, shelter, medicine, etc. - Things that enable a fully human life beyond mere animal persistence would count as frivolous luxuries - Education, art, recreation, sociality, self-development, etc. - The Modernists presumably want to affirm an "objective needs" basis for at least some of these "higher" goods - A conception of genuine human requirements that goes beyond just keeping the organism alive - But that still places firmer boundaries on truly necessary design than the open-ended proliferation of consumer wants ### Slide 2.7 - A more promising approach is to understand needs in instrumental terms - as requirements for achieving some further end or goal - Wants are desired for their own sake, while needs are instrumental to some larger purpose - "When something is needed it must ... be possible to specify what it is needed for" - Notes - The main alternative to the "survival needs" view is to understand needs in instrumental terms - X is needed if it is a necessary means to realizing some important end or value - The ends in question are not restricted to just staying alive, but can include a wider range of objective goods - Rationality, knowledge, achievement, social connection, aesthetic appreciation, etc. - This fits the common thought that for something to be a genuine need, you must be able to specify what it's needed for - The "what it's needed for" can't just be satisfying a subjective desire, but must be some evaluatively significant goal or purpose - This instrumental conception broadens the range of potential needs beyond just survival requisites - E.g. Education may not be necessary to stay alive, but is plausibly necessary for epistemic and practical empowerment - But it faces the challenge of specifying which ends can ground needs and distinguishing them from mere wants - Can't just be any purpose the agent cares about, or else the need/want distinction collapses - Needs to be restricted to ends with some objective value or importance, independent of the agent's preferences ### Slide 2.8 - However, the instrumental criterion also faces challenges - It seems that nearly any want can be reframed as instrumentally necessary for some broader desire or goal - Without limits on what counts as a valid larger purpose, the criterion may be too permissive to rule out much - Notes - The instrumental account of needs is appealing, but specifying the right criteria for "need-grounding ends" is difficult - We can't allow just any goal or purpose an agent has to count, however trivial or idiosyncratic - Or else purchasing lottery tickets could be a "need" for someone whose overriding end is to win the lottery - We need some way of privileging certain ends as objectively worthwhile or part of an essential human life - Mere intensity or stability of desire shouldn't be enough, or else needs again collapse into wants - But it's not clear how to identify the "special ends" that can ground genuine instrumental needs - Any proposal seems to require substantive value judgments about what's truly good or essential for humans - Risks imposing a particular philosophically contentious conception of wellbeing or the good life - This relates to the general difficulty of preventing the instrumental criterion from being too permissive - For almost anything a person strongly wants, we can tell some story about how it's needed for an allegedly deeper or more important end - The sports car isn't just wanted in itself, but needed for the larger goal of impressing potential mates - To avoid this, we need a way of ruling out such ad hoc end-rationalisations that isn't just a matter of individual discretion ### Slide 2.9 - This leads some to skepticism about the very concept of needs beyond basic survival - Perhaps all this talk of needs is just a rhetorical ploy to legitimate or justify mere desires - Framing a want as a need lends it an air of objective necessity and importance that is not really justified - Notes - These difficulties with clearly distinguishing needs and wants using either objective grounds or instrumental relations lead some to skepticism - Perhaps once we get beyond basic survival needs, talk of "needs" for further objects is just a rhetorical projection - We call things "needs" just to endow our mere preferences with an aura of objective necessity and importance - Saying "I need a new suit for my high school reunion" sounds better than "I really want a new suit..." - The category of needs functions to pre-empt critical scrutiny of and justify more resources for the underlying desires - On this view, needs-talk is really an exercise in social expectation-setting and signaling about what preferences have to be taken seriously - To say "society needs X" is really to say "it's obligatory/normal to substantially cater to and fund people's desire for X" - But there's no deeper truth about what people "objectively need" beyond basic biological requisites - If this deflationary view is right, it's a serious problem for Modernism's hope of confining good design to meeting "genuine needs" - There may not be any genuine needs in the relevant sense - just desires that are more or less socially sanctioned - Designers will inevitably be in the business of shaping and responding to consumer wants, not discerning objective necessities ### Slide 2.10 - If this skeptical view is right, appeals to needs cannot serve as an objective basis for reining in consumerism and ensuring ethical design - Designers would be in the business of catering to desires, just with the added pretense of serving needs - The concept of need would be an impediment to clear thinking about design ethics rather than a useful tool - Notes - The needs-skeptical view suggests that the Modernist vision of a purely function-driven design ethos is conceptually bankrupt - There is no coherent, objective way of distinguishing genuine needs that could restrict the scope of good design - Attempting to do so just amounts to covertly privileging certain subjective preferences over others - Undermines the view's claim to a purely "rational" basis for design that rises above individuals' arbitrary desires - If we accept this, then needs vs. wants talk will be an impediment to design ethics rather than an aid - It will conceal the real foundational questions of what preferences designers should aim to satisfy - I.e. what vision of the good life and human flourishing should inform their work? - These questions can't be answered by a fictitious needs/wants distinction, but require a different mode of interrogation - Investigating the actual preferences and values of design stakeholders, not speculating about objective necessities - At best, needs-talk would just be a high-flown way of expressing design priorities, not a means of discovering them - We'd have to first determine what preferences or values to uplift through design, then retrospectively sanctify them as "needs" - So the needs/wants distinction would be a useless appendage to the core value-deliberation process, not a constructive tool within it - So from this skeptical view, the Modernist vision loses its claim to a clear, objective foundation and must be abandoned or substantially reconceived ## 7.3 Is Need an Empty Concept? ### Slide 3.1 - The skeptical view that needs reduce to mere wants faces some potential counterexamples - We sometimes claim people need things that they clearly do not want or desire - "She needs to change her bad attitude" - "He needs to learn some manners and self-control" - These needs appear independent of the subject's desires or preferences ### Slide 3.2 - The skeptic may argue that these are just elliptical ways of saying the "needed" change is instrumentally necessary for satisfying other desires - E.g. you need better manners to achieve social acceptance and friendship - So the skeptic may still insist these trace back to wants, just indirectly - But this instrumental analysis seems strained in some cases - The subject may not even want the larger goods used to rationalize the need ### Slide 3.3 - A potential way to ground genuine needs is to look at their origins or causal history - Wants arise from the individual's psychology, while needs are imposed from without - Suggests advertising, fads and social pressure as sources of artificial needs - Things we only think we need because of manipulative external forces ### Slide 3.4 - But external origination cannot be the key difference between wants and needs - Many genuine needs also arise from external factors beyond our control - E.g. a medical diagnosis and expert opinion can create an objective need for treatment - Even if the patient lacks any prior desire for the treatment - So the internal/external distinction doesn't reliably track genuine needs ### Slide 3.5 - The most promising approach is Aristotelian: tying needs to objective human goods or values - A genuine need is something required to realize or achieve objectively worthwhile ends - Contrast with mere instrumental "needs" for satisfying arbitrary desires - The needed object must be necessary for a legitimately valuable goal ### Slide 3.6 - Examples of objective human values that can ground genuine needs: - Health and bodily integrity - Knowledge and education - Social connection and friendship - Meaningful work and self-actualization - Contrast with mere subjective wants: - Status symbols and conspicuous consumption - Sensual pleasures and entertainment - Conformity and social approval ### Slide 3.7 - On this view, designers concerned with needs must make value judgments about what ends are objectively worthwhile or good - The designer's role expands to include shaping the objectives and priorities society pursues - Choosing what functions and ends to design for involves a conception of the good life and human flourishing ### Slide 3.8 - This resurrects something like the Modernist vision of the designer as an arbiter of values and social reformer - The designer isn't just creating artifacts but promoting a way of life through the functions and ends they select - But now the designer's values are answerable to objective goods, not just their own preferences or ideology ### Slide 3.9 - The Aristotelian view faces objections of elitism and paternalism: - Does this give the designer tyrannical authority to impose their values on others? - Overriding individual preferences for the designer's vision of the good life - Smacks of arrogant presumption - designer playing philosopher king - Accused of favoring traditionalist, regressive values over progressive ones ### Slide 3.10 - But these charges misunderstand the view - the claim is not that conventional or traditional values are necessarily correct - Just that objective goodness, not mere tradition or popular opinion is the standard - What's needed is that these values be rationally defensible as objective goods - The designer's normative judgments should be open to rational scrutiny and debate, not asserted by fiat ### Slide 3.11 - Upholding a conception of objective goods also doesn't entail coercively forcing them on people - An ethical designer can respect individual liberty/autonomy while still thoughtfully selecting worthwhile ends to design for - Influencing is distinct from overriding - unavoidable in design, the question is how it's done ### Slide 3.12 - Ultimately, some value judgments may be unavoidable in design - Choosing what artifacts and forms of life to make possible involves judging what's worthwhile - The question isn't whether designers will make such judgments, but how - impulsively/covertly or reflectively/transparently - The Aristotelian view provides a potential framework for making principled, reason-guided value assessments ## 7.4 Does Design Alter the Moral Landscape? ### Slide 4.1 - Some theorists argue that design doesn't just introduce new ethical quandaries but fundamentally transforms the nature of ethics - The dominant view has been that only human beings qualify as moral agents - Defined by capacities like rationality, autonomy, intentional choice - Moral agency is closely tied to accountability and desert - Praise/blame and punishment/reward only make sense for free, rational choosers ### Slide 4.2 - Artifact agency thesis: designed objects also have moral agency and share responsibility with human users - "Do artifacts have politics?" (Winner) - Artifacts embody moral/political values that shape user behavior - Classic example: Moses' low Long Island overpasses and racial segregation - Bruno Latour: We delegate "values, duties and ethics" to artifacts - Artifacts have built-in "morality" that ensures ethical conduct - "It is because of this [artifact] morality that we, humans, behave so ethically" ### Slide 4.3 - Peter-Paul Verbeek: "artifacts have morality: technologies play an active role in moral action and decision-making" - Material features of objects are intrinsically value-laden and co-shape ethical conduct - Not just instruments of human agency but moral agents in their own right - Ascribing full-blown moral agency to artifacts would be a radical departure - Implies artifacts are apt targets of praise/blame and punishment/reward - Moral accountability spreads from designers and users to artifacts themselves ### Slide 4.4 - One argument for artifact agency: artifacts have behavior-guiding effects on users - "Intentionality" in original sense of embodied directedness or influence - Speed bumps "intend" safe driving by physically enforcing lower speeds - Turnstiles "intend" paid entry by physically blocking alternative paths ### Slide 4.5 - Another argument: Locating ethical responsibility solely in human agents' choices ignores how deeply our values & behavior are shaped by design - Not just enabling/constraining, but thoroughly transfiguring the option space - Must see action as a joint-product of "coupled" human-artifact systems - To focus only on the human side is to miss the autonomous contributions of material reality ### Slide 4.6 - A further argument: We already treat some artifacts as quasi-moral agents when we praise or blame them - "This speed bump is really effective at ensuring safety" - "That building design is cruel and demeaning to its occupants" - Though artifacts may not be morally responsible like humans, we do assign them morally-valenced agency ### Slide 4.7 - But deep conceptual problems remain for the artifact moral agency view... - One issue: Artifacts don't seem to genuinely "act", just to have effects on their environment - Genuine action requires mental states like beliefs, desires, goals, intentions - Artifacts at most "direct" behavior, but don't have intentional states behind this - "Aiming at" safe driving is just anthropomorphic projection, not real purposiveness ### Slide 4.8 - Another problem: moral responsibility presupposes libertarian free will, not just deterministic goal-directedness - Holding someone accountable requires they could have done otherwise - Artifacts seem at most instrumentally goaldirected, not free in the required sense - Though a compatibilist about human freedom may deny the difference with artifacts ### Slide 4.9 - The deepest issue: attributions of moral responsibility to artifacts fail to make sense conceptually/pragmatically - What would it mean to blame/punish (or praise/reward) a badly (or well) designed artifact? - These practices of holding accountable seem to have no grip or meaning here - Smashing a misbehaving robot seems more like disposing of a broken tool than punishing a moral agent ### Slide 4.10 - Granting artifacts moral agency also threatens to dissolve human responsibility into an unaccountable shared agency - Agency gets diffused through complex sociotechnical networks with no clear locus - When something goes wrong, "everyone and no one" is responsible (Dennett) - Only the human nodes can actually recognize and respond to moral demands and sanctions ### Slide 4.11 - The debate highlights the transformative impact of design on ethical life - Pervasive influence and shaping of behavior/values by technology is undeniable - The built environment "loads the dice", tilting and transfiguring the space of choice - The question is how to incorporate this without losing the unique moral status of rational agents ### Slide 4.12 - Ultimately, our core framework of ethics and responsibility still seems essentially tied to features of human agency - Practical reasoning, choice, self-conscious valuation and commitment - Capacities for recognizing, deliberating about, and acting on moral considerations - Not just goal-directedness but norm-sensitivity, not just aiming but committing - Treating artifacts as moral agents per se risks losing the crucial role of human subjectivity in ethical life # Speaker Notes ### 7.1 Applied Ethics and Design - Explain the broader scope of design ethics beyond just safety and harm prevention - Design's impact on human freedom, privacy, sustainability, equality, and other values - Discuss how new technologies create novel ethical challenges and dilemmas for designers - Unpredictable effects, conflicts with existing norms, lack of established standards - Examine the tension between technological development and designer responsibility - Determinism vs. - Examine the tension between technological development and designer responsibility - Determinism vs. choice in shaping which technologies emerge and persist - Emphasize the importance of anticipating and addressing potential misuse or negative consequences - Responsible design requires considering the full range of possible impacts - Discuss the role of ethical reasoning and judgment in the design process - Need for moral sensitivity, foresight, and systematic analysis alongside technical skills - Engage students in discussion of real-world cases illustrating complex value trade-offs in design - Identify competing stakeholder values and explore principled ways to weigh and reconcile them ### 7.2 Consumerism, Needs and Wants - Situate the Modernist view in historical context of early 20th century critiques of consumerism - Reactions against perceived frivolity and waste of design for mere aesthetic/symbolic functions - Examine the appeal and limitations of grounding design ethics in a distinction between needs and wants - Promising way to prioritize and rein in consumerist excess - But only if we can draw a principled, non-arbitrary line between genuine needs and mere wants - Discuss each proposed criterion for needs (objectivity, moral priority, instrumentality) - Note how each one prima facie captures an important intuitive difference - But also the ways each proves difficult to specify to rule in/out the right cases - Consider the opposite extreme of skepticism about needs beyond mere biological necessity - Has the concept been hopelessly contaminated by rhetorical misuse to rationalize desires? - Can it be rehabilitated, or is a want/need distinction ultimately unworkable? - Engage students in discussion of needs vs. wants in contemporary consumer culture - Do we need clearer public criteria for genuine needs to combat "need creep"? - Or would such distinctions be seen as paternalistic and inauthentic, doomed to backfire? ### 7.3 Is Need an Empty Concept? - Analyze apparent counterexamples of needing what we don't want at all - Changes in attitude, behavior, abilities, etc. imposed irrespective of desire - Explore how the skeptic might try to re-describe these in terms of indirect wants - Examine the roles of internal and external causal origins in want/need attributions - Wants seem to come from within, needs from without - but is this a reliable criterion? - Many recognized needs like medical care come from external necessities - Present Aristotelian theory of needs as requirements for objectively valuable ends - Distinguish from purely instrumental needs that serve subjective wants - Consider which commonly recognized needs seem to fit this criterion - Discuss the controversial implications of an objective values approach to needs - Vastly expands the designer's role and responsibility to include shaping society's values/ideals - Designer as more than just instrumental problem-solver, but practical philosopher - Examine charges of elitism/paternalism: Is this view anti-democratic and illiberal? - Stress that objective values ≠ traditional/conventional values, but rationally decidable - Choosing good ends ≠ imposing them on others - influencing vs. overriding - Engage students on the unavoidability vs. undesirability of moral value judgments in design - Can design really be value-neutral? Don't artifacts inevitably embody some conception of good? - But how can designers make reasoned value judgments without overstepping their expertise/authority? ### 7.4 Does Design Alter the Moral Landscape? - Explain the traditional human-centric conception of moral agency and responsibility - Rational, autonomous, intentional choice as precondition for morally evaluable action - Distinctively human capacities of practical reasoning, foresight, self-control, etc. - Present the arguments for extending moral agency to designed artifacts - Behavior-shaping effects, moral values/rules embedded in design, need to see "action" as human-artifact co-production - Comparison to how we already praising/blame some artifacts like we would moral agents - Analyze the conceptual/pragmatic problems with full-fledged artifact moral agency - Missing essential psychological prerequisites like beliefs, desires, intentions - Lack of robust alternative-possibilities freedom/responsibility to ground praise/blame - Incoherence of literally punishing/rewarding artifacts vs. just instrumental modification - Discuss the risks of diffusing human responsibility into an unaccountable network - When things go wrong, "everyone and no one" is responsible - Only humans can recognize and respond to moral demands/reasons as reasons - Explore the broader impactof technological design on the context of moral thought and action - Enables, constrains, transforms the space of choice and value in profound ways - Imbues material environment with agency and normativity, albeit not identical to human agency - Engage students on how to strike the right balance in locating moral agency and responsibility - How do we recognize the "moral charge" of designed environments without losing human ethical subjectivity? - What are the key differences between human and artifact agency that our theories need to capture? General discussion questions and activities: - Break students into small groups, assign each a real world design case involving value trade-offs - Task them with identifying the ethical considerations at stake and formulating a principled way to prioritize or reconcile competing values in the design - Have groups present their analyses and recommendations, followed by classwide discussion - Assign a short reflective essay prompt: - "Can a designed object be a moral agent? Defend your view while considering the best arguments on the other side." - Discuss: Are there cases where a product designer might have a moral duty _not_ to give consumers something they clearly want? What would justify such paternalism? - Debate: "Resolving the tension between design's social influence and individual freedom requires a renewed public discourse about objective human goods and values." Agree or disagree? - Poll students for examples from their own lives where their behavior/values have been shaped by design and material environment. Analyze these cases together. - Close with a reminder of the tremendous power and responsibility that designers wield in shaping the material/informational conditions of ethical life for whole societies. Stress the need for moral sensitivity and humility. # In Class Notes