I have been absent for several months from this blog, completing a book manuscript on ethics, which includes most of the posts here. Now that the manuscript has gone into the publisher, I want to resume posting here, including parts of the work that I wrote over the summer than hasn't yet appeared here. The following is a short introduction to the manuscript - and to the role of ethics in architecture.
Architects have ethical as well as professional responsibilities to
protect the health, safety, and welfare of others. Those ethical obligations
get addressed to a certain extent in the AIA’s Code of Ethics and Professional
Conduct, although that document, which has gone through several iterations
since its promulgation in 1909, largely focuses on business ethics: our
obligations to clients, colleagues, the profession, the environment, and the
general public.
Protecting the public’s health, safety, and welfare, which provides
the primary justification for the licensure of architects, has ethical
implications that go beyond those of running a business to encompass the
design, construction, and operation of buildings. Health relates to the well
being of people as both individuals and groups, and it parallels the attention
paid in virtue ethics to the development of character traits that that promote
well being of each person and society. Indeed, leading a virtuous life can
promote both physical and mental health.
Safety involves the related goal of having physical security and
freedom from danger. While architects cannot protect people from every danger,
building and zoning codes do guard against most physical hazards and the design
process does help practitioners anticipate possible risks during the design and
detailing of a project. The architect’s attention to public safety and
assessment of the possible consequences of every design decision grounds the
profession in utilitarianism, with its ethic of seeking the greatest good for
the greatest number.
Of all the architect’s responsibilities, welfare remains a less well
defined. Not to be confused with the system of governmental support for
unemployed people, the welfare obligations of architects does share with those
governmental programs the goal of helping people thrive and prosper. The areas
of ethics most closely related to that goal are social contract ethics, which
addresses the agreements that individuals enter into as members of a society,
and duty ethics, which argues that we should treat others as we would want to
be treated were we in their situation.
The architect’s responsibilities for the health, safety, and welfare
of others makes the practice of architecture inherently ethical, in a
profession that encounters ethical dilemmas almost continuously in the course
of designing and constructing buildings. Understanding the basic systems and
principles of ethics can help architects resolve those dilemmas by helping
practitioners determine what is the right thing to do in a particular
situation. A good grasp of ethics also enables practitioners to have greater
success in meeting the needs and expectations of communities, clients,
co-workers, consultants, contractors, and the whole range of people involved in
and affected by architecture.
