Designing Ethics - Ethical frameworks and their integration into design

This class we studied and had conversations about different views and types of ethics. The topic is super interesting and eye-opening, because it reminds me to my philosophy classes, where we approached the same questions, but maybe not from the point of view of innovation.

The question which are starting from a very individual scale to a scale where the answer has a wide impact on the individual’s surroundings, see below how how it evolves.

  • What should I do?
  • What is the right thing to do?
  • What should I do?
  • What is the right thing to do?
  • What actions are morally justifiable?
  • What kind of person do I want to be?

    • Just analysing the last one, it seems like a very specified and individualistic question. However looking at it from a broader perspective is it actually just a moral question to ourselves or is it a question that moralises our impact in our society?

    Based on these questions, we studied about different (western) approaches of ethics:

    • Deontology - Ethics based on our basic principles - The theological definition of it comes from the bible, based on the 10 commandments, the philosophical one is originated from Emanuel Kant. It measures if an action is good or wrong based on such rules: as killing, stealing, lying.

  • Consequentialism - the ethics of possible effects, it measures the consequences based on a judgment about the rightness or wrongness, which problem is it is difficult to apply (how do you calculate the impact of it, what is it based on?) It could also be experiments between life and death, like the trolley experiment.

  • Care ethics: The good or bad, right or wrong are to be evaluated in how they support relations. It’s a relational ethics, i.e. it involves caring. There are many design related approaches which applies this methodology the most. Such as Lekmshy and László at the Care Lab Barcelona (see their 6 care interventions out of seven below on the picture) “Care seems to me to be the most basic of moral values. Without care as an empirically describable practice, we cannot have life at all since human beings cannot survive without it. Without some level of caring concern for other human beings, we cannot have any morality. These requirements are not just empirical givens. In every context of care, moral evaluations are needed. Then, without some level of caring moral concern for all other human beings, we cannot have a satisfactory moral theory” (Virginia Held)

    • These approaches can be inspirational leading points when defining a moral question, but these are usually only mediating between possible answers.