OUGD501: Context of Practice 2 - Ethics: What is Good? Lecture

First Things First Manifesto - By designer Ken Garland, published in 1964

• Less of a manifesto in a political sense
• Signed by designers
• Produced in a 'boom' time
• Frustrated that creative, talented designers were wasted their talent producing marketing for pointless products
• Sigh of the waste and exploitation of creative talent in a capitalist society
• Proposing a ethic turn 
• Designers should use their talent in a more productive way

First Things First Manifesto 2000

• Re-published by Ad Busters, a explicit anti-capitalist magazine
• Re publish and re-draft the first things first manifesto
• More critical and more venomous, advertising gets a lot of stick

• Sub-verts

• Making people buy things they don't need with money they don't have
• Complicit in a system of global exploitation

• If you work to market any sort of consumer product, you are unethical 
• Should be using your talents to start a revolution 

• Culture Jamming

• To be a ethical designer, must be fundamentally anti-capitalist

• Famous, rich Graphic designers such as Milton Glaser signed the First Things First Manifesto 2000, easy to have ethics when you don't have to worry about money etc.

• System which allows this to happen is in fact unethical

• To be an ethical designer, aim to do more with your life and with you talent

Meme

• Something that sticks in your head
• Circulates around the world virally

• Meme Warfare - What happens if creative advertisers use their power to create a revolution? 

Victor Papanek

• Design For The Real World
• Believed most design is wasteful
• Most design made the world worse
• Beer Can Automobile Can Bumper - cost $5, drove it into the Senate Building, people are ignoring design solutions for the sake of profit.
• Designers make things look prettier 
• We are just touching the surface, there are more important things

How do we determine what is good?

Ethical Theories

• Subjective Relativsim - There are no universal moral norms of right and wrong, all persons decide right and wrong for themselves 
• Cultural Relativism - The ethical theory that what's right or wrong depends on place and/or time
• Divine Command Theory - Good actions are aligned with the will of God, bad actions are contrary to the will of God
• The holy book helps make the decisions

Kantianism

• Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804) a German philosopher
• People's wills should be based on moral rules
• Therefore it's important that our actions are based on appropriate moral rules.

To determine when a moral rules is appropriate Kant proposed two Categorical Imperatives:

1. Act only from moral rules that you can at the same times universalise - If you act on a moral rule that would cause problems if everyone followed it then your actions are not moral
2. Act so that you always treat both yourself and other people as ends in themselves, and never only as a means to an end - If you use people for your own benefit that is not moral

Utilitarism (John Stuart Mill)

Principle of Utility (also known as the Great Happiness Principle) 

•  An action is right to the extent that it increases the total happiness of the affected parties
• An action is wrong to the extent that it decreases the total happiness of the affected parties 
• Happiness may have many definitions such as: advantage, benefit, good or pleasure

Social Contract Theory

• Thomas Hobbes (1603-1679) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
• An agreement between individuals held together by common interest
• Avoids society degenerating into the 'state of nature' or the 'war of all against all' (Hobbes)
• We trade some of our liberty for a stable society

Criteria for a workable ethical theory?

• Moral decisions and rules:
• Based on logical reasoning
• Come from facts and commonly held or shared values
• Culturally neutral
• Treat everyone equally