JISCMail - PHD-DESIGN Archives

I certainly don't mean by that "one's egoistic maximization regardless of
consequences for others" or "that every individual should have
his/her personal morals, that stand above whatever the rest of the society
might believe to be the right moral"; those attitudes describe the negative and extremist sides of individualism, which are unfortunately more common than one would wish. Morality is definitely a social and collective matter (this is, by the way, synonymous with "political" in the classical, non-politician, sense), since ethics has fundamentally to do with "The Other". Brynjulf's categorization of ethics, with which philosophers agree and on which they debate, is very helpful in design indeed. I also couldn't agree more with the statement that "[ethics] is about
what goes on between people", but one must admit that if there must be anything happening there, then something else must have happened before "in an individual's head" or, I prefer, in the individual's heart. In my
view also, "all human acts are potentially moral if they have implications for the
wellbeing of others" and "a moral person is one who tries to take account of
others in their actions. As such the morality emerges out of that 'taking
into account' ", but again, if anything has to emerge at all, if the 'taking into account' has to take place, then there must be a moral agent first of all, i.e. an individual, a personal will. For "the specific morality [to] emerge from the engagement with the 'other' ", there must be a "specific" somebody who wants this emergence to take place and who is willing to engage. Therefore, what interests me in a pedagogical perspective, is to find out how this individual will is put into action for a moral act, how the individual moral judgment is activated in the 'taking into account', what does 'engagement with the other' feel like and where in the individual soul it springs from, what is the difference between a moral, an aesthetic, and a cognitive judgment, how these three fundamental individual judgments are harmonized (or not) in a design act, and so on. My emphasis is on the genesis of the moral act within each INDIVIDUAL, not "in general", since every human being is unique and will have his/her personal way (depending on the temperament, the biography, the experience, the education, the expertise, the aspirations, etc.) of dealing with the moral issue. And true, ideally, every moral -and for that matter every design- act has to be re-invented again in every situation, otherwise we have routine, or customs, or mores. It is for these reasons that I mentioned the fact that it is preferable to teach ethics first on the individual level, to ground ethics anthropologically on the individual moral judgment, rather than to talk about ethics in design in a general way (this also has to do with the context in which this conclusion arose, i.e. a three-year research project followed by a conference on 'Ethics, Technology, and Responsibility in Design'). In this respect, I definitely am in favor of a 'situation ethics' and certainly closer to the 'virtue ethicists' than to the Kantian or 'deontic ethicists', the 'utilitarianists' (the most common in design) having, in my view, false anthropological (that is:statistical) foundations ("Niemals als Mittel, stãndig als Zweck"!).