Professional Polygamy

A well-known consulting firm frequently joins more than one design team competing for the same commission. Each competitor wants the consulting firm on its team because of the expertise it would bring to the project. And presence of the consulting firm on several teams gives it an advantage, increasing the chances that it would win the commission. But the firm’s presence on several teams also raises ethical issues related to the privacy, confidentiality, and impartiality toward its multiple partners.

Monogamy or devotion to one sexual partner at a time has long had a central role in most ethical traditions. Anthropologists have observed that polygamy can arise in cultures where maximizing offspring has clear survival value or where there exist a small number of men in relation to women. Such situations, however, remain relatively rare and even in cultures that once accepted polygamy, like the Mormons, they often move toward monogamy once they have achieved a degree of security and relative equity in the number of men and women.

These relational issues, however, extend beyond those related to a sexual partner to include professionals teaming up to pursue a project. While jealousy, fear, and anger rarely occurs in work-related teams and they do in personal relationships, many of the same ethical issues apply to both our private and public partners.

That becomes most apparent in cases such the one described here, in which a consulting firm “plays the field,” with a similar relationship with several competitors for a project. In the business world, of course, contracts can address the problems that can arise from a consultant’s presence on several teams, requiring, for example, that the consulting firm have different staff members on different teams, that the firm treat each team equally in terms of staff time and support, and that the firm’s employees keep the conversations and activities of their teams confidential – all to ensure that each competitor faces a level playing field and that each has an equal opportunity to win a commission.

Despite such contractual agreements, however, there remain situations that can color the equanimity of the consultant. For instance, what if the consulting firm sees one team having a real advantage over others competing for the same project and a greater likelihood of winning the commission? Should the consulting firm put its best people on that team most likely to win? Or should the firm, instead, treat even a likely winner the same as every other team, with equally strong people on all of them?

Ethics may seem divided on such questions. Duty ethics urges us to treat others equally, as ends in themselves and not means to our ends, while utilitarian ethics asks that seek the greatest good for the greatest number, which if applied to the fortunes of this consulting firm, suggests that it should try to pick winners. The similarity of this situation to marital polygamy suggests otherwise, however. Those who live with multiple marital partners have spoken about the necessity of treating each partner as equally and fairly as possible in order to reduce the potential of jealousy, fear, and anger among them.

With that in mind, it seems wise that the consulting firm give each of its teams the same care, attention, and talent, especially since the firm cannot know for sure of who will ultimately win the project and antagonizing a future partner makes little sense. Ultimately, acting with reciprocity in mind provides the best course. The consulting firm should treat each of the teams it is on as it would want each of those teams to treat it: fairly. 

The Aesthetics of Ethics

A lawyer colleague, who wrote a book entitled Moral Capitalism and who runs an organization devoted to business ethics, wants someone with an architecture or design background among the contributors to an online journal he wants to start. While the journal seems needed in an era of one business-related scandal after another, having a designer among its writers raises the question of what an aesthetically oriented field has to contribute to ethics.

Western culture, said the 19^th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, cycles between periods of order and disorder, calmness and wildness, or as Nietzsche put it, between the Apollonian, referring to Apollo, the Greek god of reason and truth, and the Dionysian, referring to Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and ecstasy. That idea echoed the notion of the 18^th century writer, Edmund Burke, that the West has embraced two opposite ways of thinking about aesthetics as either a search for beauty or the “sublime.” We sometimes admire the orderliness, proportion, and balance that have traditionally characterized beauty, and at other times, we like the messy, disturbing, and overpowering that Burke called the sublime.

Such theories say a lot about our own time. While we can find both Apollonian and Dionysian qualities in contemporary culture and both the beautiful and sublime in the current art world, it does seem as if the Dionysian sublime has had the upper hand over the last century. Just read the news, rife with stories of street violence, foreign wars, political scandals, and business swindles. Or look at contemporary art and architecture. From intentionally outrageous musicians and actors to emotionally raw paintings and novels to phenomenally twisted or shard-like buildings, our aesthetic tastes – like our ethical expectations – definitely tend toward the sublime.

Both Burke and Nietzsche recognized that cultures couldn’t maintain such an extreme for very long. We eventually tire of the sublime and start to see it not as inspiring, but as simply ridiculous. Many causes no doubt contribute to this turning away from the sublime, but certainly one has to do with the economic and material conditions of a culture. The sublime seems inherently wasteful and excessive, which in turn reflects a degree of confidence among people that we have enough excess to waste without worry about running out of things. While that may have characterized the 20^th century, with its oil-fueled economics and its nuclear-powered politics, it does not mirror the 21^st century. Ours seems, at least so far, to be a time of conservation rather than waste, of environmental and social concern rather than personal excess and outrageousness.

Many people, though, have not yet gotten that message. If anything, our world seems even more extreme than in times past, with politicians more polarized, businesses more powerful, and artists more personal than many commentators can ever remember. It’s as if we have to push excessiveness itself to such excess that we can no longer sustain it and find ourselves forced to change. To use Nietzsche’s allusion to Dionysus, the god of wine, we seem like an alcoholic who has gone on one last binge before becoming sober.

So what might a designer contribute to a journal about business behavior? What might aesthetics, in other words, contribute to ethics? Just this: the aesthetics of the sublime and the beautiful, of Dionysus and Apollo, offers not only a way of understanding art. It also helps us see why we find ourselves surrounded by so much excessive, unethical behavior on the part of so many people in positions of power in both the public and private sectors. It explains their ridiculousness.

Aiding Someone in Distress

On the street outside of an architectural office, a woman gets her car stuck in the snow in the middle of the street in the midst of a storm. Several people in the office go to her aid, attempting to move her car out of the road. One person in the office, however, keeps working, saying that he doesn’t have time to help, while another person leaves to go home, saying that she needs to attend to her own family before she helps someone else.

Helping another person in distress remains one of the most common situations in ethics and one of the most basic responsibilities that people have for one another. The reciprocity at the very heart of ethics arises here: I need to help others as I would want them to help me were I in the same circumstances. But reciprocity is rarely symmetrical. More often than not, we help others without ever receiving the same kind of aid in return or assistance from the same people. There exists, in other words, few quid pro quos in ethics; the good we do may never get done for us.

In a commercial society such as ours, in which we constantly exchange one thing of roughly equal value to another – money for a possession, fees for a service – the lack of a direct connection between an action and the payback can make ethics seem like something for suckers. Why help someone, a committed capitalist might ask, if we receive nothing in return?

Ethics, of course, offers several reasons why. Virtue ethics argues that by doing good for others, we cultivate characteristics in ourselves that make us successful in other aspects of our lives. Commerce, for instance, depends upon trust, which in turn relies on virtues such as honesty, fairness, and prudence. Contract ethics argues that helping others remains central to our membership in a community. If we don’t come to the aid of others, we start to lose the mutual assistance that lies at the heart of a properly functioning society.

Likewise, Kantian ethics claims that we have a duty to do what is right regardless of the consequences or the inconvenience. Anything less than that begins to unravel the kind of behavior essential to civilized life. Finally, utilitarian ethics points out that the greatest good often comes from responding to fellow citizens in need. Moving a car stuck in the middle of the street allows the plows and other vehicles to get by, benefiting many more people than the one person stranded in the snow.

The office mates who responded to the woman stuck in the snow may have had these or other reasons in mind: they may have wanted to do good or simply to get out of work and have a good time. But what about the two employees who did not go to the woman’s aid? Were they unethical? The one who kept working felt that his duty to his job came first, while the other who left to go home likewise felt that her family came first.

Such thinking has an ethical basis. We must constantly weigh one duty against another and if it appears that more aid would not fundamentally change an outcome or that others may need our help more than the person right in front of us, then we have legitimate reasons not to come to another’s aid. Ethics, like design, is profoundly contextual, demanding that we see a situation from the broadest possible perspective before deciding what to do. It does no good to do no good.

Modern and Postmodern Ethics

We do not often think of ethics as a creative endeavor. As a branch of philosophy, ethics has had to adhere closely to reasoned argument and to logical analysis, which we typically see as counter to or at least different from the creative leaps of imagination that characterize the arts, for example. That was not always the case. Ethics and aesthetics once shared a close relationship, epitomized in the ancient idea that truth (philosophy), beauty (aesthetics), and goodness (ethics) had an inseparable relationship with each other. 

The knot that tied them together, however, slowly unraveled over the last two centuries. Truth increasingly became the purview of the sciences, which demanded experimental data to establish the truth of a situation or phenomena, rather than just the reasoned arguments of philosophy. As a result of this, by the early 20^th century, philosophy, which had given birth to science, once called “natural philosophy,” had begun to emulate and even imitate science, using mathematics and logic to make a philosophical argument in much the same way that scientists used these tools to assess experimental data.

Meanwhile, the link between aesthetics and beauty came apart as well. Edmund Burke’s recognition of the sublime, with its fascination with the terrifying or overwhelming, as the complement to the balance and order of beauty as traditionally understood, marks the beginning of that coming apart. Art over the 20^th century became increasingly obsessed with the sublime, to the point where beauty has become a term almost never mentioned in aesthetic circles or said with a degree of embarrassment.

Ethics followed suit with its two classical companions. Nietzsche’s argument that claims of goodness served as a cover for the will to power and G.E. Moore’s observation that the good remained a simple un-analyzable object of thought represent just two of many late 19^th and early 20^th century efforts to equate ethics with subjective, intuitive, or emotive qualities that set it apart from the increasingly objective, logical, and rational nature of modern philosophy.

Ethics became isolated, not only from the mainstream of early 20^th century philosophy, but also from aesthetics. In other words, just as truth and goodness go through a divorce – the facts of science, after all, are neither good nor bad – so too did the relationship between beauty and goodness. This began with claims by 19^th century artists and critics who advocated “art for art’s sake,” and who sought to protect aesthetics from moral analysis or from having to make a moral point. The goodness of a work of art must rest upon its own aesthetic merits and not upon some nostalgic or didactic attempt to depict “goodness.”

That sundering of truth, beauty, and goodness underlay the scientism and abstraction of early 20^th century modernism, a period in which ethics seemed to go into a kind of temporary eclipse. Morality became associated with 19^th century “Victorian” culture, while the “good” 20^th century modernist faced up to the unvarnished and even sometime terrifying facts of life, finding comfort in the utilitarian functionalism of the machine age.

Late 20^th century Post-modernism represented, in some sense, the revenge of ethics. While post-modernists questioned the actual objectivity of science and the covert moralism of modern art and architecture, they also made ethics newly relevant with the advent of feminist ethics, environmental ethics, bioethics, and applied ethics of all sorts. Such post-modern ethics did not reverse the divorce of truth, beauty, and goodness, but it did show how ethics offered a powerful way of revealing and questioning the will to power that underlay a lot of modern science, technology, and art.

Design Thinking and Ethics

What does design thinking – the practical imagination that enables us, as Herbert Simon put it, to turned existing conditions into preferred one – have to do with ethics – the assessment of good and bad behavior or right and wrong actions? What can ethics, an analytical field, contribute to a creative field like design, and what might design thinking, of increasing interest to disciplines searching for more innovation, add to ethical thought?

The practitioners of design and ethics have a core competency in common: both have an interest in understanding human behavior and in analyzing human needs and interpersonal relationships. Ethicists focus that interest toward determining what someone should or should not do in a conflicted situation, while designers direct that interest toward the creation of environments, products, structures, or systems that accommodate people’s needs and direct their actions.


In both cases, the question of what constitutes the good invariably arises. What, an ethicist might ask, defines a good character or a right action, and what, a designer might asks, determines a good resolution of the right problem? At the same time, both fields remain resolutely applied and particular to specific cases or circumstances. While design and ethics both have plenty of theories that seek to guide judgment, the test of those ideas inevitably comes through the analysis of a particular problem in a given space or time and what the most appropriate solution to it entails.


Likewise, both disciplines proceed to assess such things in similar ways. Ethicists and designers will typically gather background and contextual information to help them understand the nature and scope of a problem or conflict, look a the reasoning behind and consequences of various responses to the situation, and arrive at a conclusion or solution that seems to address the greatest range of issues or requirements in the simplest and clearest way possible. Often, the best resolution of a dilemma arises from the most thorough assessment and most creative response to it.


While ethicists do not have design codes, at least not anything enforceable, designers have codes of ethics. In that sense, the two fields have an asymmetrical relationship, in which ethics influences not only the nature of designers’ work, but the actions of designers themselves. Design, like all areas of human activity, thus has a subordinate role in relation to ethics, and designers’ behavior toward others – clients, communities, colleagues, contractors, and so on – comes under the regulation of ethical codes, much as their decisions often come under the restrictions of building, fire, and zoning codes.


Designers may, on occasion, gripe about the latter code restrictions. However, they know full well that such constraints also set limits that help define the nature and scope of their freedom to create. As Nietzsche, one of most nihilistic of ethicists, once wrote, great artists “dance in chains,” making their work look effortless despite – and because of – the restraints placed on it by the community and by the artists themselves. Creativity involves not only the search for the right problem to solve, but also the pursuit of the restrictions within which a good solution can emerge.


Codes of ethics, though, have a much different role and relationship to design than do the codes that seek to protect the health, safety, and welfare of people affected by what designers do. While human health, safety, and welfare all have moral dimensions and implications, ethics goes far beyond the minimum standards that designers must adhere to in building codes. Ethics asks of us to be our very best, to maximize our potential as human beings and as human communities. Just as aesthetics helps us achieve beauty, ethics helps us achieve goodness, and that is a beautiful thing.   

Pressure from a donor

An architecture school received an application for admission from the relative of a wealthy man, who had been talking about leaving a substantial gift to the university in which the architecture school stood. The admissions committee, upon reviewing the applicant’s portfolio and transcripts, decided to deny him admission, which angered the prospective donor, who threatened to rescind his promised gift. The university asked the school to reconsider its decision, although the admissions committee stood behind its choices.

Colleges and universities have become increasingly dependent upon wealthy donors in order to make up for such things as declining state support, dwindling grant amounts, or depressed endowment returns. Donors, of course, have long had a role in higher education. The medieval English universities, for example, arose out of the patronage of the nobility and the royalty. And virtually every North American campus has signs of donor largesse in the form of everything from named buildings to named bricks. Call it a kind of high-priced graffiti.


There remain limits, though, in how far that can go. Philanthropy, by definition, does not allow funders to have much control over specific application of their gifts. They can direct their giving to achieve a particular goal – to see a building built, research effort launched, or student scholarship established – but the details of how their funds get used or who benefits from their gifts lie beyond their purview. The tax deductibility of the donation demands it.


That does not mean that donors won’t try to influence faculty or university decisions. Rarely do those efforts become as blatant as the situation here, where the donor threatened to withdraw a planned gift when the school did not admit his relative. This shows that philanthropists, ironically, can have more control before they give a gift than afterward, given the voluntary nature of their donations. As a result, the university has to decide where to draw the line and when to walk away from the gift rather than sacrifice something of greater value.


In this case, that value lies in the ability of the faculty and staff to assess the quality of candidates for admission. That ability may seem elitist to some, but in the end, decisions about who to admit have a very practical purpose: to determine who can do the work required and who, among all of those seeking admission, will have the greatest likelihood of success. From that perspective, admissions committees do weak applicants a favor in not letting them in and setting them up to fail. That does not mean that errors in judgment do not occur. Sometimes, seemingly weak candidates can blossom in a program and excel far beyond anyones expectations.


However, that possibility does not negate the general rule that admissions should remain blind to any factor that does not pertain to the potential of the candidates to succeed in a program. In this case, if the school admitted the relative of the donor out of a sense of obligation to the institution rather than out of a belief in that person’s ability to do the work, it would have likely become even more of a problem later on. Would the donor be any less angry if his relative eventually failed out of the program, having spent tuition to no avail? The school has to support the faculty’s judgment as to the best candidates, since that judgment, in the end, has far greater value than any donation, however much it might be needed. Better to let go of a gift than to go after it and lose one’s self-respect in the process.  

Wishing a competitor ill

A developer client asked two firms who often compete for work to provide the fee that they would charge to design a major project in China. One firm gave a very low fee and the other, a much higher one. The client asked the firm with the higher number if it wanted to match the other firm’s lower fee, but the high-bidding firm refused to come down, not because it didn’t want to do the project, but because it wanted its competitor to have to do the work and lose money in the process, weakening its ability to compete for other, more desirable opportunities.

In Chinese martial arts, one strategy involves using competitors’ energy against them, letting them exhaust themselves by not resisting their attack. That same strategy seems at play here, with two competing architectural firms engaged in a kind kung-fu-like competition to see which would succeed in attaining a commission. The Chinese client clearly thought that both firms could do the project, so their capability or capacity to deliver didn’t seem decisive in determining which firm to choose. Instead, it came down to price: which firm would do it for less.


Fee bidding may seem straightforward, but in kung fu competition, paradox often prevails. The client’s wanting the two firms to propose fees immediately put all three in an oppositional stance: not just the two firms against each other, but the two firms against the client. That may seem like a smart thing for a business-oriented and price-sensitive developer to do, but as often happens, fee bidding is anything but smart. In an architect-client relationship, in which collaboration is paramount, starting the interaction in a competitive and overly cost-conscious way seems unwise. It’s like arguing with your heart surgeon over the price of the operation before going under the knife? You can do it, but you might live to reap the rewards.


Here, the client’s wanting the work done as inexpensively as possible led the one firm to decide that it did not want the work, giving a high bid to ensure that the client would select the other firm or pay dearly if not. The other firm obviously felt otherwise and so it seems that everyone won: the client got low fees, the one firm won the bid, and the other one avoided what seemed like a conflict-ridden commission.


There remains, though, an ethical issue here, not in the fact or the outcome of this competition, but in the intention of the firm not selected in wanting the other firm to lose money on the project. Such a desire goes beyond a healthy sense of competition to an unhealthy antagonism and animosity. The martial arts involve not just physical competition but moral conditioning, training not just the body but also the mind and spirit. As a result, kung-fu shows us how to compete ethically as well as effectively, how to defeat an opponent without hurting them, knowing that the desire to harm another only harms one’s self.  


It may not seem as if any harm had been done here. Neither the client nor the selected firm need know about the other firm’s ill will. Maybe the two firms had tangled before in ways that led to such acrimony and maybe the one firm had acted in ways in the past that deserved the enmity of the other. But none of that matters ethically. Wishing harm on another, however well deserved it may seem in the eyes of an antagonist, represents a loss of self-respect. Morals matter more than money when determining who wins or loses in life.    

Unions and Strikes

An architect took a job with the government job, which required that she join the union. She did so, even though she did not believe professionals should unionize. That conflict came to a head when the union went on strike and she was asked to walk picket lines even though her projects needed her continued attention. Which trumped the other: her duty to the union or her duty to her work?


Ethics come into play whenever we have to decide where to draw the line between what we will and will not do in a conflicted situation. Some ethics, like that advocated by Kant, emphasize the purity of the position we should take in such situations, doing what we believe to be right regardless of the possible negative consequences to others or us as a result of our actions. Other ethics, like utilitarianism, takes a more contextual approach to problems, urging us to assess the possible outcomes or effects of one action versus another before we decide which course to take.


That difference may reflect different personality types as well: those who see things as black or white versus those who see them in shades of gray. Architects, generally, fall into the latter category. Not only does the design process demand that we deal with a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty, but the buildings that often result from that process almost always have permeable or overlapping areas that are neither completely public nor absolutely private, but partly one and the other at the same time. While buildings may appear clear cut, with definite edges and distinct dimensions, the designed environments we inhabit comprise almost entirely of shades of gray.


That does not necessarily apply to our principles, however. There, shades of gray can look like a shirking of our duties and a shunning of our responsibilities. That question faced the architect in this situation, in which her obligations as a member of a union on strike run counter to those she owes her projects as an architect. A strike represents a black and white choice, a cessation of work, in a world of grey, in which the flow of money and materials involved in the construction of buildings continues unabated. That becomes even more problematic, ethically, if we disagree with the organization to which we have an obligation, as in the case of this architect, who did not believe that professions should belong to unions.


While she accepted joining the union as a requirement of her job, should this architect go on strike when the union demands it even if she doesn’t want to? How do her obligations to her union compare to her duty to her projects or to her beliefs as a professional? The answer such questions may depend upon how much we are willing to pay the consequences of our convictions. The architect here can disregard the strike and disobey the union for reasons of conscience, but she may lose her job or have to pay for her principles, such as paying a fine to the union.


She might also consider the “both-and” solutions that characterize the shades-of-gray world of architects. She could, for instance, not go to her office or cross the picket line, but still make herself available to and check in on her projects to ensure that they continue to go well. Or she might respect the wishes of her union by going on strike, but refuse to stand in a picket line or advocate for an organization to which she belongs by virtue of her employment, but not her beliefs. Design thinking can improve not only our environment, but also our ethics. 

Rankings

A school of architecture received a probationary accreditation and needed to improve its image quickly, so the head of the school wrote letters to alumni urging them to respond to a survey to determine the top schools in the country. Although the school had had a relatively low rating the year before, that mobilization of alumni propelled the school to the number one rank, even though colleagues around the country knew about the probationary accreditation. The organization that produced the ranking saw the school as simply promoting participation in the survey, although others saw it as an attempt to game the system, raising questions about the school and the ranking system itself.


As rankings have become an ever more important way for prospective students to assess the quality of schools, the stakes in getting a good ranking have also increased. A rapid drop in the rankings might mean that a university will disinvest in a program or worse, consider shutting it down, just as a meteoric rise in the rankings can lead to an increase in applications and investment. These rankings systems have real consequences not just in attracting the best students, but also in terms of a school’s survival.


Rapid rises or falls in the ranking of schools, however, should serve as a red flag. Because of the stability of the faculty and the tuition and endowments that fund their salaries, the quality of most schools and colleges do not change that much from year to year and neither should their relative rank. If a dramatic change does occur, it raises questions about the credibility of the school, the ranking system, or both. Once someone has begun to game the system – figuring out how to manipulate the results while remaining within the rules – it increases the likelihood that others will do the same out of cynicism about the whole process.


Some professional school rankings have long suffered from such cynical gamesmanship. Law school rankings, for instance, ask how many former students are employed nine months after graduation, and so schools will often put unemployed recent graduates on the law-school payroll during that particular month in order to boost the number of employed graduates and with it, the ranking of the school. While costly to the school – and a short-term benefit to employed graduates – that practice shows the extent to which, once one school has started to game the system, they all do, making that particular criteria, and maybe the rankings themselves, meaningless as a result.


That law schools engage in such practices shows that it isn’t illegal. But is it ethical? By almost any measure, the answer is no. Gaming a system to increase the ranking of a school violates such virtues as fairness and prudence, revealing a complete disregard for competing with others on a level playing field and a serious lack of good judgment in taking advantage of one’s peers. It also represents an abrogation of one’s duty to engage honestly with one’s colleagues, doing to others what a school would not like being done to them. And, it demonstrates a failure to assess long-term consequences. Whatever the short-term gain, gaming a system will either lead to others doing the same, as has happened among law schools, or to others dismissing the game itself. It may appear that this architecture school has rocketed to the top of the rankings, but it has actually rocketed to the bottom of everyone else’s estimation and esteem, which is the only ranking, in the end, that really matters. 

Opportunism

An architect who once led a preservation program received a commission for a large site that included a few historic buildings. Rather than incorporate or work around them, he wanted the maximum freedom for his design and called for their demolition, using his knowledge of architectural history to argue that they had no significance. The community, as well as his preservation colleagues objected, but he prevailed and the buildings came down.

Opportunity has a largely positive meaning in capitalistic countries. We associate it with freedom and individual initiative, with having or making a chance to profit from our efforts. In that sense, opportunity becomes both a political idea – America as the “land of opportunity” – and a personal aspiration of taking an opportunity when it comes our way. A somewhat more sinister meaning, however, attaches to the related word opportunism. We often think of an opportunist as someone who takes opportunity too far, who pursues it past the point of reason and does so heedless of the negative impact it might have on others. We like opportunity, but not opportunists.

That distinction has partly to do with intentions. When we seize an opportunity, we typically respond in an open way to the chance before us. Opportunism, in contrast, has a somewhat more malevolent cast, in which people take advantage of others or seek advantage for themselves in the process of seizing an opportunity. But we cannot judge opportunism simply on intentions alone; context and consequences also factor into what we value. We might applaud an opportunist who looks for a chance to overthrow a tyrant, to help a person in need, or to right a wrong. Taking advantage of someone evil or seeking an advantage on behalf of an underdog exemplify the good side of opportunism.

It seems hard to make that case, however, in the situation described here. This architect not only had an opportunity – a major commission on a large site – but he also became an opportunist when he used his knowledge of architectural history to argue against the preservation of historic buildings. That the community or his colleagues objected to his actions seemed not to deter him, as he sought to maximize the potential of what he had and to give himself the maximum freedom to do what he wanted, without any encumbrances. Opportunists tend to see that they have the right to pursue opportunities regardless of their effect on others.

What they rarely see is the effect this has on how others perceive them. The architect in this case may have felt justified in arguing against saving the historic buildings on his sizable site, but what he gained in terms of greater design freedom, he lost in terms of his own reputation as an advocate for preservation and even more importantly, as someone his community and colleagues can trust. Once opportunists become branded in the minds of others as people who will do or say anything to get their way, they can never retrieve their former standing, since every act of sincerity will come tainted with the suspicion that they actually lack sincerity and will say whatever seems to their advantage at the moment. Far better, when architects confront situations like this, to work with the community and colleagues who have protested, engaging them in a discussion of alternatives, and assessing with them the pros and cons of each. That still may not have led to the saving these old buildings, but it will do something just as important: saving the architect’s hard-fought reputation.

Humanitarian Design

A recent architecture-school graduate, who has done a lot of humanitarian-related design during and after school, thought that he needed a real job. And yet almost all of the jobs available to someone with his education were with architectural firms that depend on commissions from the top 5% of the U.S. population, who now control 63.5% of the wealth in the country and whose widespread resistance to social programs prompted the very humanitarian work he had done. What should he do?

The United States has rarely had such economic inequality as it has now, making it the most unequal country among the developed nations and even among many much-less wealthy developing nations. With that rising inequality has a come a widening political polarization in the U.S., with about half the country believing that the wealthy need to pay more taxes in order to support much-needed social programs and the other half, only a minority of whom are actually wealthy, seeing this as theft of their hard-earned money. The polarization has little logic behind it. Some of the strongest advocates for greater equality are themselves wealthy and beneficiaries of the inequality, while many of the loudest opponents to higher taxes come from the ranks of those who would benefit from the social programs they despise.

Architects have become caught in this political endgame. Because of the costliness of buildings, architects have long depended upon commissions from wealthy individuals and organizations as well as from governments and non-profit entities. And yet most architects enter the profession in hopes of improving the quality of life not just of their clients, but also of the myriad people who inhabit or experience their buildings. The political polarization in the country has placed those two realities at odds. Architects’ dependence upon the wealthy for work often means that they must work for those who actively oppose the government’s efforts to improve the quality of life of all of its citizens.

That conflict has become particularly troublesome to young people who, unfettered by the ethical compromises of their elders, see only unappealing options, as in the case of this architectural graduate. He can either act on his ideals and live a life as impoverished as those he seeks to help or make a larger wage and set aside his principles to work for clients who have benefited from the inequality that has contributed to the very problems he wants to address. Some architectural firms, of course, work primarily for governments or non-profits or work in areas like affordable housing and elderly housing, and so he has alternatives to firms that cater mainly to the wealthy. But what about his aspiration to make humanitarian work his career: how might he find a way to support himself doing the work that not only he wants to do, but that millions – and globally, billions – of people need him to do?

Ethics can help when we face situations like this by redefining the terms of what we consider to be a good life. Most ethical traditions recognize that wealth takes many forms and that the personal satisfaction and social recognition that comes with dedicating ourselves to a cause we believe in can more than compensate for the meager monetary returns and material rewards that may result. The architect graduate here, in other words, might be best served by continuing to do the humanitarian work he has done, accepting the lifestyle that comes with it, and counting himself fortunate to be among the relatively few people who allow themselves the freedom to do what they love to do.

Recusal

An architect serving on a state board that selects firms for public projects has an architect-spouse whose office can benefit from the board’s decisions. While the architect on the board excuses herself from board deliberations whenever her husband’s firm competes for state work, some architects think that her knowledge of the board and her collegiality with board members gives her husband’s firm an unfair advantage. Is her recusal on specific projects enough or does her very presence on the board represent a conflict of interest?

Recusal or the disqualification of oneself in the face of a possible conflict of interest typically applies to judicial proceedings, in which judges abstain from cases if they cannot render a fair hearing for any reason. Judicial statues outline the types of situations in which recusal should occur: if judges have a personal prejudice against parties in a case, if they have personal knowledge about disputed facts in a case, if they have already rendered an opinion about a case, or if they or their immediate family will gain financially from a case. Ensuring the ability of a judge to make an impartial decision remains common to them all.

That becomes more difficult when a decision involves a group of people, as in the case here, where one person on a board has an on-going conflict of interest related to her husband’s firm competing for work. Her acknowledging the conflict and recusing herself when her husband’s firm interviews for projects help to minimize the possibility that the board’s decisions might unduly favor that firm. But is that enough? Does her very presence on the board and her knowledge of board discussions give her husband’s office an unfair advantage?

Recusal depends on the virtue of the people involved. The ability of this architect to make a prudent decision on a case-by-case basis, weighing the possible unfairness or injustice that can arise from her position on that board, lies at the heart of this case. If she can temper her desire to see her husband’s firm succeed and not try to influence other board members even when she recuses herself, then a situation like this can work. The problem with focusing only the virtue of the person involved, however, is that others may not believe her or may not agree that she has been prudent or fair enough.

The appearance of conflict of interest matters as much as the actual fact in such situations. With a person in a public position of power such as this, the appearance of favoritism can tarnish every opinion of the group, despite her recusal when her husband’s firm interviews. However much other board members bend over backward to ensure that no undue influence has affected their decisions, the public may not believe them, and that, in the end, is all that counts.

Because of that, either the architect in this case needs to step down from the board or her husband’s firm needs to agree not to pursue state work while she sits on the board. While the others in his firm may not like that prohibition, it seems only fair that it remain an option. It also may be the wisest course for the firm, since the appearance of a conflict of interest may so influence the board that its members may hesitate awarding that firm a state project for quite  awhile. Better to end a conflict of interest than to end up in a futile - and financially draining - effort to overcome it.

Professional Turf

   

The architecture profession has opposed the licensure of interior designers in most states, believing that the granting of licenses to interior designers is unnecessary and anti-competitive. Many in the interior design community have argued, instead, that architects’ opposition amounts to little more than turf protection, combined with a degree of condescension and gender bias on the part of a predominantly male profession toward a predominantly female one. Which side is right?

Architects and interior designers both determine the location of walls, and while that activity unites these two fields, it has also become a metaphor for what divides these two professions in their battle over licensure. Because it remains difficult to sort out the differences between what architects and interior designers do in terms of the design and detailing of building interiors, architects have claimed that any effort to define that difference – to build a clear separation between their respective responsibilities - becomes impossible. Further, architects have argued that since they already have legal responsibility for the entire building, inside and out, licensing interior designers becomes unnecessary and redundant.

Walls look different, though, depending upon which side you are on. What may look, to architects, like an attack on the wall around their profession often looks, to interior designers, like an effort to keep them out and to monopolize an area of activity over which architects have never had complete control. Electrical, mechanical, and structural engineers, for example, often work extensively on the inside of buildings and architects have not questioned the legitimacy of engineers’ licenses. Why then do architects question the expertise of interior designers whose knowledge of furniture, fixtures, and finishes often extends far beyond that of most architects?

This dispute has become more heated as the global economy has increased competition between the two fields. As design services have become readily available from almost anywhere around the world, the urge to protect one’s turf becomes ever stronger as free-trade fervor seeks to override all such protections. This has led, in the case of interior design licensure, to the decidedly odd situation of libertarian groups opposed to professional licensure altogether joining licensed architects trying to prevent their interiors colleagues from becoming so. How long will it take before these same libertarian groups to turn on architects? As Aesop famously said, “we often give our enemies the means of our own destruction.”

While politics has dominated the battle over interior design licensure, ethics may offer more help in sorting out which of the antagonists in this situation have right on their side. Duty ethics has certainly played a major role in this dispute. Both architects and interior designers claim to have the best interests of the public in mind and we have no reason to doubt their well-intentioned desire to do what they believe to be right. However, duty ethics hasn’t helped us resolve this conflict, since both groups have pointed to their duty to protect public health, safety, and welfare as the reason why they have taken opposite positions.

Utilitarian ethics may provide more useful path forward. When we look at this situation in terms of what would bring the greatest good to the greatest number of people, it becomes hard to support either side, for internecine war between two professions does a lot of damage to the reputation of both and very little to help anyone else. If anything, the growing belief that the greatest good comes from a much more integrated form of practice, in which architects, interior designers, engineers, and contractors work more closely together, makes this dispute over licensure seem like a battle left over from the last century. A more creative solution, and one that would allow both sides to transcend this self-defeating fight, might involve the licensing of the integrated teams that will increasingly create our built environment. We can become so intent on protecting our turf that we don’t notice that the ground has shifted and that the turf we have so long protected may no longer matter. 

Organizational ethics

A national organization had reserved a hotel’s conference facilities in Arizona prior to the passing of legislation in that state targeting undocumented people of color. One member of its board objected to the organization going ahead with the conference in Arizona, despite the financial penalty it would have to pay for canceling the reservation, but a majority of the board voted to proceed with their meeting plans. What should those opposed this decision do?

Professional organizations have ethical responsibilities like individuals. We expect organizations to be honest in their dealings, prudent in their decision, and fair in their treatment of others. We also want the leaders of organizations to carry out their roles dutifully and to assess the consequences of decisions with the greatest good in mind. Organizations get held to the same ethical standards as people because such entities remain nothing but collections of individuals. What we expect of one member of a group, we should expect of all.

That, however, discounts the effect that interpersonal dynamics can have on the individuals in a group. As we saw with the often-ordinary German citizens engaging in heinous behavior under the Nazi regime during World War II, actions that many would likely have found objectionable prior to the war began to seem normal and socially acceptable in the perverse psychology practiced by the Nazi’s. The ethics of the group, in this case, veered far from what most people would consider ethical. While most Nazis carried out their duties faithfully, their actions toward the Jews and other minority groups represented an almost complete lack of virtue – dishonest, imprudent, intemperate, and unfair – and an almost complete blindness to the dire and ultimately self-destructive consequences of such behavior.

The Nazi example can make all other ethical dilemmas pale by comparison, bit it does highlight an important aspect of organizational ethics. How should an individual member of a group respond to actions taken by the whole that the person finds ethically objectionable? Does a member of a group have a duty to accept the will of the majority or does that person have a stronger duty to follow his or her own conscience and to refuse to follow objectionable actions by others?

It depends. In a democracy, citizens not only have the right to vote for those who we want to represent us, but also the responsibility to obey the law, even when we disagree with it. We saw that in Arizona when, in response to that state’s enacting of a law that allows police to target immigrants, people protested for a while, but the real action will come in the next election when those same opponents have a chance to elect new representatives willing to change the law.

That same duty, though, does not apply to those in other states or nations. They did not elect the leadership in Arizona who passed this legislation and so non-residents who object to the Arizona law have a right and, ethically, an obligation to put conscience before convenience and to refuse to participate. The extent to which a person takes that refusal remains up to them. In this case, one member of the board decided to resign rather than continue to take part in the organization, while others decided to remain involved in the group, but to skip the Arizona meeting.

Some might argue that refusing to take part in an organization or to go to a meeting does little to change things, but that depends upon what we mean by change. Groups may not care about isolated protests and individual acts of conscience not sizable enough to disrupt the whole, but the individuals taking these actions do care and that is all that matters ethically. The most powerful force on earth remains our refusal to go along with something that we see as wrong. No amount of social pressure or physical coercion can match the power of a committed will.

Virtues of Research

A university required all faculty members to complete a short, online course on ethics prior to their pursuit of research funding, and one faculty member in the architecture school refused to do so because he saw the course as irrelevant to his work and a waste of his time. He, nevertheless, pursued research funding and the administrators in his school had to decide whether to let him do so or not.

We often associate research with the scientific revolution of the 17^th and 18^th centuries and the industrial revolution of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. But research depends around an idea that dates back to the ancient Greeks: that ethical actions stem from the virtue of those engaged in the activity. While we may value research according to its consequences – did it result in new knowledge or a useful discovery? – we also depend upon researchers’ integrity, honesty, and fairness in order to trust their conclusions.

The research community has put in place mechanisms to ensure trustworthy conclusions. The anonymous or “blind” review of a scientific paper by peers prior to its publication and the replication of a scientific experiment by others to see if the same outcomes occur represent two effective ways of catching unreliable or unverifiable results. A third, relevant to the situation here, involves insisting that researchers understand and adhere to the highest ethical standards.

Some in the architectural community have discounted the relevance of this to their work. For some, architecture entails the speculation upon future possibilities rather than the discovery of facts about the world as it exists. The “truth” of a speculation rests upon its ability to convince people of its value, not upon its verifiability. Meanwhile others have questioned the objectivity of all human activity, science included. This more-radical idea doesn’t distinguish between design and science, but instead sees a degree of subjectivity and cultural relativity in both.

Such arguments, however, do not diminish the role of virtue: in even the most subjective or speculative work, integrity, honesty, and fairness matter. Nor do the virtues essential to research end there. The cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice also apply: research demands the use of good judgment or prudence, a temperate sense of balance and reasonable limits, the fortitude to keep pursuing a promising idea despite setbacks or unexpected results, and a just concern that the results have widespread benefits.

The so-called theological virtues of faith, hope, charity, and love also have relevance to research. Although we often think of science and faith as sharply divided, researchers have to have a degree of faith in the value of their work and hope in its ultimate success. At the same time, they have to love what they do, given the long hours devoted to their pursuits, and to have a charitable respect for the work of others. In research, as in all creative activity, we cannot entirely disconnect good work from the goodness of the people doing it.

Which brings us to the faculty member who refuses to complete the online exercise on ethics in order to compete for research funding. At one level, this represents a contractual as much as an ethical issue: when we accept employment we also agree to follow the rules of our employers, however much we may dislike them. At another level, the faculty member’s refusal to take the course raises serious questions about his prudence and temperance, and suggests that his superiors would be wise to prohibit him from pursuing funded research for which he seems temperamentally ill suited.

Obfuscation

A well-known architectural critic writes an article full of jargon words that only a few fellow theorists would understand. When the editor of the journal for which the article was written translates the words into prose most readers comprehend, the author demands that the editor reinstate several words to signal that he has read the current theory. The editor has to decide whether to acquiesce to the author’s wishes or to stand up for the reader’s comprehension.

Every discipline has its own jargon: words that have specialized meaning to those in a field. Jargon can enhance people’s productivity by increasing the efficiency of conversation among those who understand it, encapsulating in a single word or phrase a complex theory or body of knowledge. In that sense, jargon increases communication by saving us time. But jargon also diminishes communication by decreasing the ability of others outside a field to understand the lingo of those on the inside, placing a wall between those in the know and those who are not.

We may take some comfort in the jargon of others. If we have an illness or an injury needing immediate attention, we may welcome the argot of medical personnel as they attend to us, speeding up the delivery of the treatment we need, even though we may also worry about what their conversation portends in terms of our prognosis. In situations like this, we can find ourselves torn between a desire to understand a specialized terminology and a desire not to know.

In most cases, though, jargon becomes an unnecessary barrier between people. While it may save time, words comprehensible to only a few mainly serves to enhance the prestige and power of some over others, a gambit that has gotten so out of control that many disciplines now have sub-fields with their own terminology that even fellow professionals do not understand. Technical language, in other words, has begun to raise ethical issues, evident in the dilemma of the editor described here.

Nietzsche once described architecture as “the will to power by means of form,” and we might call jargon the will to power by means of words. Power relations, be they architectural or linguistic, bring us immediately to the question of who has power over whom, by what means, and to what end? If the power that professionals wield has, as its goal, improving the lives of others – as in the case of attending physicians or, one hopes, in the case of architects looking after the public’s health, safety, and welfare – then we happily grant them that power through their license to practice. But it quickly becomes an abuse of power if professionals simply want to show, through their actions or their words, that they know or possess something others do not.

Ethics panels look for such abuses of power when it comes to the actions of professionals, and editors have the responsibility to do so when it comes to words. Audience matters here. If the readership of a publication understands the jargon, then editors should allow its use in order to save readers’ time and the journal, space. If there exist, however, a number readers who may not understand what a particular writer has written, the editor has a responsibility to translate the jargon into words that most, if not all, will comprehend.

A follower of Nietzsche might call this simply a matter of the editor’s will to power over that of the writer, and that may be true. But if we resist the temptation to reduce every conflict down to a question of power and instead take a more nuanced view of ethics, the editor here has an obligation, contra Nietzsche, to defend the interests of those with less power – the readers in this case – against a writer who wants to use jargon to assert his power over them and to elevate himself in the eyes of a few peers. When writers knowingly use arcane words to impress others with what they know, all it really shows is how little such writers know.

Moral Hazard

Among a group of students who went through architecture school together, one decided, after graduation, to pursue a career on Wall Street, which he saw as a more certain path to financial security. Fifteen years later, he got into financial trouble and asked his former classmates for a loan, even though they all made substantially less income than he had. Some in the class wanted to give him the loan while others thought that he should live by the consequences of his choices.

Moral hazard describes any situation in which a person or group remain insulated from the consequences of their actions and so engage in unreasonable risky behavior, knowing that they cannot lose. Frequently, those who take such risks have done two things to protect themselves: they often have more information than others, which gives them an advantage when things start to go wrong, and they often have set up the system so that they will come out ahead regardless of what happens. While those outside the system face the material hazard of actual losses, those on the inside face the moral hazard of acting irresponsibly with little or no penalty. 

The hedge-fund-fueled crash on Wall Street in 2008 offered a painful example of the suffering moral hazard can cause. Hedge funds, as their name implies, allow banks to hedge their bets so that they come out ahead whether or not their investments reap a profit or not, wagering for and against something at the same time. When they use other people’s money and when inside information allows those making such bets to insulate themselves from any losses, the level of moral hazard rises accordingly. It would not matter if moral hazard only resulted in the loss of an investor’s ethical moorings. But, as we saw after 2008, it often harms a great many people, in that case, literally billions of people around the world. The moral hazard of a few can become a real hazard to us all.

It can even become hazardous to those who engage in it, as happened with this former architecture student turned investment banker. Architects have a duty as licensed professionals to protect the health, safety, and welfare of others, and as a result, the built environment has all sorts of protective, durable, or redundant features to ensure that buildings won’t collapse, systems won’t fail, and inhabitants won’t get injured. Insulating other people – and themselves – from such hazards remains a central part of what architects do. It may not seem like such a leap, in that sense, to move from the physical protections of architecture to the financial protections of investment banking. Both architects and bankers have insider knowledge of how systems work that the general public often does not, and both have designed products to not only benefit their clients or customers, but also to protect the professionals themselves against undue risk or liability.

The difference lies in the risks they impose on others. Architects face little or no moral hazard in the sense that they remain very exposed to litigation and to the loss of their licenses should a state find them incompetent to practice. While they may take aesthetic risks, most architects have an aversion to risk when it comes to others health, safety and welfare – as they should. We have seen the opposite on Wall Street. The reckless risk-taking with others money and the insulation from the consequences of it via the taxpayer bailouts of the banks and insurance companies involved in the 2008 debacle, show how morally hazardous investment banking has become.

The solution to moral hazard lies in ensuring that those who engage in unreasonable risk know – and have to pay – the consequences of such behavior. On the policy level that means that the government should not bail out financial institutions in the future that continue to engage in the kind of actions that led to the 2008 economic collapse. And in the case of this investment banker, it also means that his former classmates should not bail him out, however much they might all be friends. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Quid Pro Quo

A university ranked design and construction firms pursuing projects at the institution not only according to their skill and experience, but also in terms of how much money they had contributed in support of students, either through scholarships or internships. Some in the construction industry shrugged this off as part of the cost of doing business, while others saw it as extortion.

Rising tuition and declining public support for higher education have led many colleges and universities to search for other forms of revenue in order to balance their books. Donations from alumni and supporters of these institutions have become one of the most important sources of additional income, enabling administrators to reduce the cost of attendance through scholarships and enhance the experience of students through internships, among other forms of extra-curricular activity.

Raising money in this way seems like a win-win for everyone. Students receive a more affordable education, donors see the immediate benefit of their gifts, and universities can stretch their already limited funds. The tax laws, at least in the United States, make this an attractive transfer of money from wealthy adults to poor students, while also encouraging investment in our future through support of the best and brightest of our youth.

But what if the donations are not entirely voluntary? What if, as in the case here, gifts to an institution come as part of a quid pro quo in exchange for giving a commission to the individual or firm making the contribution? And does it matter if this “you-scratch-my-back, I’ll-scratch-yours” approach to philanthropy goes to a good cause – financially supporting students in need – or do the ends, however noble, not justify the means?

Philanthropy, of course, always involves a degree of pressure applied by those seeking a gift on those who have the capacity to give. That pressure, though, almost always takes the form of playing upon a donor’s allegiance to the institution, eagerness to help others, or desire to be recognized or remembered in some permanent way. At the same time, there almost always involves some quid pro quo in philanthropy, although that, too, usually involves acknowledging a gift publically, naming something in honor of the donor, or inscribing the donor’s name in some highly visible place.

But when donations to a college or university get linked to doing business there, a ethical line gets crossed. However “voluntary” this may seem, in that a firm has the right not to pursue a business opportunity with the institution, giving a gift in order to compete for work has more of the characteristic of extortion. In a difficult economy, when firms may be desperate for work and unable to walk away from a possible commission, this arm-twisting on the part of the institution becomes even more objectionable, taking advantage of businesses, financially, when they can least afford it.

Situations like this highlight the limits of modern ethics. A utilitarian might argue that ranking firms based on the amount of scholarship money they have given disadvantages a few – the owners of a firm – in order to benefit many – the generations of students who will receive the scholarship. At the same time, a Kantian might argue that the good intention of the institution to help students in need makes this policy acceptable, however objectionable the means of doing so.

But good ends or good intentions do not justify any means, and extortion – even if implicit in a request for proposals – must remain outside the bounds of what we consider ethical. We would, otherwise, quickly create a condition in which bribery and extortion became an expected aspect of trade, a practice that we see happening in some corrupt countries and that has the paradoxical effect of impoverishing everyone as a few try enriching themselves in the process. A world in which no good deed happens voluntarily means that only bad ones will.

Students’ Intellectual Property

A public university wants to claim the intellectual property of its students’ design of a passive solar house that a university in a neighboring state wants to erect as a cabin for visiting faculty in one of its research stations. The intellectual property claim would prevent the latter university from building multiple copies of the house without additional payment.

Architecture is, in many respects, inseparable from property. As Jean Jacques Rousseau said in his 1754 Discourse on Inequality, “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground … (and) saying This is mine … was the real founder of civil society” and the founder of architecture as well, for a building requires that its owner controls the plot of land on which it stands. Architecture has a less stable relationship with intellectual property, however.

We can pace out and mark the boundaries of a piece of real estate, but how do we define the boundaries of an idea or a design? We cannot replicate a piece of land; by definition, each parcel of property remains unique and capable of ownership. But given the almost infinite combinations of forms, spaces, materials and products that constitute a building, and the ability to construct replicas of it from the same set of drawings, how much must change in a design before one differs substantially from another?

The home-building industry highlights this problem. That industry depends upon standard home plans, widely available on newsstands and the Internet and capable of purchase from the plan providers who hold the intellectual property of their designs. At the same time, home builders constantly modify those plans to fit particular site conditions or home-owners’ needs, and at what point does that become a new design, a unique piece of intellectual property capable of replication without having to pay the original plan provider?

This question becomes even more complicated when considering the intellectual property of students’ work. In this case, the students’ design of a solar house as part of a group project in school makes it almost impossible to say whom among them owns the intellectual property. Which student’s ideas define the unique characteristics of the design? And do they know, for certain, that no one else has ever come up with essentially the same design, since architecture – unlike inventions – almost never gets patented? The primary protection of a design comes, not from the patent office, but from its being a unique response to a particular site and client and so, almost by definition, unrepeatable.

To get past some of these complications, the university here wants to claim the intellectual property of its students’ work to ensure that the neighboring state institution does not replicate the students’ design multiple times without their home university – a presumably, their home department – reaping some benefit. At first glance, this seems like a reasonable precaution. Why wouldn’t the university want to protect their students’ work and to ensure that others don’t build more than one copy without permission and some form of payment?

But setting up something as property also puts in place the prospect of “taking” property and the conflicts that arise from that. As Rousseau wondered, “from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: … you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.” In other words, the very establishment of property leads to horrors as well as honors, misfortunes as well as fortunes. And that becomes particularly unfortunate when dealing with intellectual property, which can put unnecessary boundaries around ideas and unreasonable limits on discoveries that have widespread benefits.

That might lead us, in this case, to ask: How much should the students’ design seek protection, not under intellectual property laws, but rather under the requirements of academic publishing, where acknowledgement of sources defines the “payment” one colleague gives to another, and where the lack of such acknowledgement and the resulting claim of plagiarism has far more dire consequences for those who might steal an idea? In other words, how much, to paraphrase Rousseau, do the fruits of the designer belong to everyone and a design idea belong to us all?

Infrastructure versus architecture

A public utility plans to run high-tension lines next to a college containing a number of important works of architecture. The power poles and wires would also obstruct the distant view of a main building on campus, which the architect purposefully designed to be seen as people approached from afar. The utility claims that that location had the lowest cost, and the college has taken the utility to court to stop the installation of the power lines there.

We often think of a utility in terms of the publically regulated companies that provide us with the water, heat, and power we use in our daily lives. But the word “utility” has a different meaning in ethics, and understanding that difference can help resolve this dispute. Ethically, utility means the usefulness of an action, and it leads us to ask, of any situation: did it produce good consequences or bad, and if so, for whom and how many? Utilitarianism, one of the dominant modes of modern ethics, has “utility” as its root word, and it can prove useful in sorting out conflicts like this one.

Among the various types of utilitarianism, the distinction between hedonistic and ideal utility might shed the most light here. Hedonistic utilitarians judge the consequences of an action according to the pleasure it brings or the pain it avoids. In the case of this power utility that wants to route its lines in the most cost-effective way, the reduced expense to the company and presumably the reduced rate increases to customers that result from it, produces the most pleasure, if measured economically.

Ideal utilitarians see things differently. They argue that we determine something to be good or bad for reasons that transcend simply pleasure or pain. A good consequence for an ideal utilitarian would factor in intellectual, aesthetic, or even spiritual values, and not just those related to physical pleasure or economic profit. That distinction has obvious relevance to current political debates. Those who would willingly cut government spending on what they see as extraneous activities in order to keep taxes as low as possible clearly fall into the hedonistic camp, even though such “conservatives” might not like being branded as hedonists. Meanwhile, those who willingly pay more taxes in order to support public benefits such as parks, schools, and arts and cultural organizations just as clearly fall into the idealist camp, a description that might also rub some “liberals” the wrong way.

In the situation here, the power company has made a hedonistic argument: run the power lines along the lowest-cost route to keep ratepayers’ increases down. Meanwhile, the college has made an idealist one: the aesthetic value of its buildings makes their visual disruption by power lines an unacceptable consequence. These two positions may seem irreconcilable, but not so, according to the 19^th century philosopher, John Stuart Mill. He argued for a middle ground, that while pleasure matters to people, there are higher and lower pleasures. The pleasures of the body and the profits of marketplace, for example, remain of lower quality than the pleasures of the mind and profits of cultural activities, which Mill saw as having a more enduring and ultimately more satisfying nature.

To the hardheaded CEO or a hard-hearted conservative, such sentiments may seem cloying. When the bottom line becomes the primary determinant of all value, intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual values have little to do with the utility of an action. But ideal utilitarians and those who accept Mill’s middle ground have a compelling case here. The slightly increased cost of re-routing the power lines cannot compare to the irreparable damage to the college’s campus or the visual disruption of peoples approach to it that the intended location of the power lines would cause. The rate increase that might come as a result of routing the lines would affect only the ratepayers and only once; meanwhile, the impact of the proposed route would affect the college’s faculty, staff, students, and visitors for a very long time. Based on the simple utilitarian calculus of what brings the greatest good to the greatest number, apart from one’s hedonistic and idealistic leanings, there is no question that the greatest utility stems from the utility moving its lines and respecting the approach and aura of the campus.