Category Archives: Ethics

Universal Design Praxis

Design, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

I find the term Design Thinking inadequate.

First, the term Design Thinking belongs to IDEO. As far as I know, they made the term up, they use it for marketing and it remains closely associated with them. It is uncomfortably too many things at once:  a semi-grassroots movement, a (vague) methodology, a bag of tricks, a style, an approach to problem-solving and a trademark.

But second, thinking is only one part of what goes on with Design Thinking. And in fact in Design Thinking thinking is demoted from its usual exalted position. In most situations in most organizations, making and doing activities are preceded by lengthy talking, making of cases, adducing of evidence, modeling, deciding, planning, and other activities of the head. But with Design Thinking, making and doing become more equal partners  with thinking in determining what will be thought and done and made. Hands and feet enter the picture and work alongside the head (and heart) to shape what transpires.

For this reason, I am inclined to characterize this way of working more as a practice than a way of thinking.

Even practice fails to go far enough, though, because a practice can still position a practitioner outside of what is being worked on. With design problems one struggles inside them, rather than working on them or puzzling over them. Anyone who has gone through the wringer of a deep design problem can tell you: design immerses, involves, challenges and changes people at an unnervingly fundamental level. This is why talk around design, design thinking and related movements like UX and service design can get a little breathless and zealous and quasi-religious: because it does stimulate — even forces — unexpected and profound self-transformations. Because of this — because the practice of doing/making/thinking iteratively feeds back into and self-modifies the doing/making/thinking and perceiving process, and the practitioners involved in it, it should be called a design praxis.

And since the active domain of design praxis is all systems involving both subjective free-willed, choice-making entities (a.k.a. people) and objective entities — and such systems are ubiquitous —  it might even be called Universal Design Praxis. According to this perspective, most problems are actually design problems. When we limit design to traditionally define design areas (graphic, product, digital, architectural, interior, fashion, and so on) we misdiagnose problems as engineering, marketing, management, economic, etc. problems — and usually end up factoring out the crucial element of free-will, and wind up treating people as beings to manipulate, control or coerce.

There is a moral/political dimension to design praxis: it works to engage human beings as free and appeals to free choice, and this also contributes to the whole movement’s quasi-religiosity

So here are the core principles of Universal Design Praxis:

  • Any development of systems comprising both objective and subjective (free-willed) components is best approached as a design problem. (This encompasses the vast bulk of human activity.)
  • Design problems are resolved through iterative cycles of first-hand immersion, collaborative reflection, collaborative making, testing, revision, etc. Whatever the specific techniques used, they are used with this thrust in this basic framework: go to reality to learn, to make, to relearn, to remake…
  • Design praxis changes the practitioner as the problem moves toward resolution — the practioner self-transforms into someone capable of seeing a solution that initially was invisible.
  • Design praxis involves reflective collaboration — multiple people working directly with realities (as opposed to speculating or recalling or applying expertise). Abstractions are derived afresh from direct exposure to reality (the reality of people, things, actions, institutions, places — whatever contributes to making a situation what it is).
  • Design praxis assumes, affirms,  appeals to, and amplifies free-will.

 

Gorging ouroboros

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Ethics, Philosophy

Gorging Ouroboros

Every philosophy is a philosophy of some kind of life.

For too many generations philosophers have philosophized about philosophizing to philosophers philosophizing about philosophizing.

This has turned philosophy into something exasperatingly inapplicable to anything important to anyone except a professional academic philosopher.

My belief (or self-interested prejudice) is that being a philosopher who philosophizes a life of human-centered design is a great privilege at this time in our culture.

Human-centered design lives at the intersection of many of our most problematic oppositions: theory-vs-practice, objectivity-vs-subjective, intuitive-vs-methodical, individual-vs-collective, revolution-vs-evolution, symbolic-vs-real, narrative-vs-fact, qualitative-vs-quantitative, holism-vs-atomism, coercion-vs-persuasion, technology-vs-humanities, natural-vs-artificial . . . , etc.

My philosophy feeds on the live problems and anxious perplexities that seize groups of diverse people when they collaborate to improve the lives of other people by changing social situations — physically, practically, symbolically and emotionally — and in this effort become so desperate to succeed that they are willing to stake or sacrifice their own cozy worldviews for the sake of sharing understandings with others.

I am convinced that philosophy can (and will soon) regain its relevance. It just needs a diet of something other than its own self-gorged self.

Human [second] nature

Ethics, Politics

If someday we finally persuade ourselves that free will, souls and individual purposes were inventions, that they are sustained only by our linguistic and pedagogical habits, that they can easily be dis-instituted and explained into non-existence — I hope the insight doesn’t come before an even deeper insight: That the most important elements of humanity are our second-natural ones: what we have made of ourselves in the act of making things for ourselves.

Cultural activity is working to form the second-natural essence of future generations. I want us to have free-will, souls and individual purposes because I like having them, not because I think they have an existence apart from “mere” human ways of being.

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Do not argue with me about what is natural with the expectation that naturalness compels acceptance.

Show me that a thing is good and for whom it is good and which good things must be sacrificed to have it.

Individuality

Ethics, Politics

My liberalism insists (that is, posits passionately) that every human being ought to be taken as an individual, as opposed to an example of a category of person.

With respect to policy I consider this ideal a binding law worthy of coercive action. Publicly, all individuals are obligated to observe the legal right of individuality — at the least within one’s own spheres of citizenship.

With respect to individual attitudes I consider this ideal something worth advocating persuasively, but always respecting the individual’s right to decide. Privately, individuals may regard other individuals as mere examples of categories of person, and liberals must never resort to coercion to change this.

Split loyalties

Ethics

A persistent thought from the last several months: The best loyalties are dual, with a  foreground that is individual, particular and positive, and a background that is transcendent, universal and negative. The foreground is inspirational, but the background requires faith. A person who has only the former will be so full of passionate intensity he will be unable to constrain his violent impulses, and person who has only the latter will lack the convictions to uphold justice.

Somehow we must link the foreground of our loves, inspirations and concrete commitments, to the cool and unlovable universals that sustain our lives together.

Let us not pretend

Ethics

“We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. Hence this initial skepticism will be a mere self-deception, and not real doubt… Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.” – C. S. Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities Claimed For Man”

This applies at least as much to ethics as it does epistemology.

Can we really doubt the immorality of the worst atrocities, even if we are unable to explain or account for morality?

This is a real living question, a doubt in my heart about the dubitability of morality.

 

Damaged tissues

Ethics

Richard Rorty, from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature:

Presumably those who say that the phenomenal is nonphysical are not complaining that being told how the atoms of the bat’s brain are laid out will not help one feel like a bat. Understanding about the physiology of pain does not help us feel pain either, but why should we expect it to, any more than understanding aerodynamics will help us fly? How can we get from the undoubted fact that knowing how to use a physiological term (e.g., “stimulation of C-fibers”) will not necessarily help us use a phenomenological term (e.g., “pain”) to an ontological gap between the referents of the two terms? How can we get from the fact that knowing Martian physiology does not help us translate what the Martian says when we damage his tissues to the claim that he has got something immaterial we haven’t got?

Damaged tissues. I started worrying at this point about what kinds of tissues might constitute a person’s being, and what kinds of pain they produce when damaged. I kept thinking about an episode of On Being, featuring Jonathan Haidt where he discusses the more extensive sense of morality among conservative personalities. Are the tissues of a conservative’s being enmeshed in the customs of their community and the definitions of  words?

 

 

Intellectual conscience

Ethics, Philosophy

To be reasonable means one must take evidence seriously, especially evidence that contradicts our convictions. We must answer, but we can and often should answer with questions. But these questions must be real: “Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.” Our intellectual conscience tells us what we believe and do not believe in our hearts. It prevents us from clinging to dead beliefs, and it forbids us from abandoning our live beliefs, and it demands suffering without resolution when suffering is due.

Engineering and design

Design, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

Engineering develops systems of interacting objects.

Design develops systems of interacting subjects and objects.

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When we engineer systems that ought to be designed, the systems we create demand subjective beings to function as objects. Algorithmic rule-following replaces free choice.

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Social engineering has always been a horror. Social design might be our salvation.

Cat-agoraphobic political statement

Ethics, Politics

I acknowledge only voluntary political identities, and  I condemn all involuntary identifications.

Every individual American has the right to make political alliances according to his or her own ideals, and it is on this alone the individual should be judged.

If the political body you’ve chosen to join and identify with imposes political identities on other groups defined by race, sex, class, orientation, or any other non-voluntary classification, for any reason no matter what the justification (including imputed capacities or incapacities, genes, essences, spirits, lineages, legacies, texts, behavioral probabilities, etc.) politically you are not my friend. I don’t care which direction your racism or sexism or chauvinism or xenophobia points, or why you point it in that direction. The problem is not the target — it is the targeting.

I’m prepared to be politically isolated and to suffer the consequences for refusing to treat enemies who resemble me in irrelevant ways as natural allies. I have only artificial allies: people who collaborate with their own natures to overcome mere nature to become super-natural, and who affirm other’s attempts to do the same.

Otherwisdom code

Ethics

To be know and live on terms with what could be otherwise means:

  • To be alert to the permanent possibility of surprise.
  • To embrace the anxiety of listening to stark otherness.
  • To show hospitality to truths that await invitation to enter.
  • To be faithful to mute realities that speak only in experiment.
  • To respect every thing as the heart of an everything.
  • To remember that every single time “this time is different.”

This practical knowledge of actualizing what might be otherwise can be called otherwisdom.

 

Five facets of reason

Ethics

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

— William Butler Yeats

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In “The Second Coming” Yeats poses one of the great ethical riddles: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Who are the best and the worst? What defines them as best or worst? How does the question of best and worst connect with questions of belief and will?

What does it looks like when the best rediscovers its convictions?

My own attempts to resolve these questions have more and more revolved around reason. In fact, these attempts have traced a tightening spiraling question: what does it mean to be reasonable?

Below is a first attempt at an answer.

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Reason is not elemental. It is essentially composite and essentially complete.

With reason, the closest approximation to reason is the furthest thing from reason: a facet removed from reason is not reasonable; but reason deprived of one of its facets is unreasonable.

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Reason is fivefold:

Reason is empirical. Reason begins and ends with concrete experience.

Reason is logical. Reason follows the rules of thought, for the sake of civility.

Reason is realist. Reason exists toward a world beyond the realm of knowledge.

Reason is experimental. Reason’s knowledge arises from interaction with reality.

Reason is supple. Reason is ready for surprise, because surprise is the mark of the real.

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An isolated facet of reason is not reasonable.

Empiricism divorced from reason is impressionistic.

Logic divorced from reason is empty.

Realism divorced from reason is helpless.

Experiment divorced from reason is impulsive.

Suppleness divorced from reason is submissive.

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Reason deprived of one of its facets is unreasonable.

Reason without empiricism is delusive.

Reason without logic is arbitrary.

Reason without realism is solipsistic.

Reason without experiment is scholastic.

Reason without suppleness is stagnant.

Law of Reason

Design, Ethics, Hermeneutics, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

To neither lose one’s receptivity nor to lose oneself in it: uncompromising enforcement of the law of reason on all, most of all oneself.

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“Reason? Why?”

Because it is reasonable.

“But that’s circular.”

It is the greatest circle. It is certainly more expansive than the tiny, skull’s-breadth circuit you’ll spin within if you try to move in your own straight line on your own flat terrain.

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Reason is essentially experimental, not logically deductive. To know a thing means interactive fluency. To understand it means to take part, to participate — to become part of an exceeding whole.

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Reason is 90 parts ethics, 4 parts ontology, 3 parts rhetoric, 2 parts epistemology, 1 part logic.

 

 

Universal respect

ANT, Ethics, Politics

To disrespect the “mundane” obstacles that confront us in our attempts to meet our goals – to indignantly declare that some obstacles have no right to exist – to believe it is degrading to wrangle with them – such attitude are not only unhelpful practically for navigate these obstacles, they’re also unhelpful morally.

To believe one is too great to bother with  lowly things is a sure route to manifest pettiness. (Perhaps the only surer route to pettiness is obedience to lowly things.)

Holding obstacles in high regard elevates us and assists our progress. We are not degraded by humble obstacles when they compel us to afford them the respect they deserve.

This is not a vision of humility. It is the opposite of that.

The power to not care

Ethics

Freedom is the power to refuse to care about what you do not care about.

Very few people have this freedom. Few can even admit they lack it, because admitting it means conscious hypocrisy, which is much trickier to sustain and manage than self-delusion, a.k.a. sincerity. So most people go the sincere self-delusional route.

Refusing to care about what you do not care about releases energy for caring about what you do care about, which begins with feeling value, that is, knowing what you care about. Hypocrisy and self-delusion consume your energy and make it much harder to feel value, much less to act resolutely in accordance with what you value.

In unfreedom, valuing and caring is something whipped-up or faked but mostly longed for blindly, without even a concrete object of longing.

Consolations of gnosis

ANT, Ethics, Ideas

I finished “Irreductions” from The Pasteurization of France.

To me, Latour looks like the most rigorous and radical fusion of Nietzschean and Pragmatist I’ve read.

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Superficially, Actor-Network Theory looks almost amoral, but Latour always inserts a moral at the end of his fables.

ANT neutralizes the twin delusions of omnipotence in knowledge and helplessness in practice that prevents visionaries from taking an honest shot at actualizing their ideals. The consolation of knowledge has seduced the most imaginative intellects of the world to build paltry private kingdoms in their minds — each a place of its own — leaving uncontested the domination of the public world to whoever will dominate it.

ANT closes off all antipolitical paths. Those who wish to gain power have exactly one option: build alliances.

Latour’s novel insight is that those alliances occur not only between people but between people and things, and strength is nothing more or less than the cooperation lent by each participant in the alliance.

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Some quotes from Heraclitus seem compatible with this line of thought:

“The waking have one world in common, whereas each sleeper turns away to a private world of his own. ”

“Men who love wisdom should acquaint themselves with a great many particulars.”

“We should let ourselves be guided by what is common to all. Yet, although the Logos is common to all, most men live as if each of them had a private intelligence of his own. ”

 

Where politics has no rights

ANT, Ethics

A hint at Latour’s ethic:

We would like to be able to escape from politics. We would like there to be, somewhere, a way of knowing and convincing which differs from compromise and tinkering: a way of knowing that does not depend upon a gathering of chance, impulse, and habit. We would like to be able to get away from the trials of strength and the chains of weakness. We would like to be able to read the original texts rather than translations, to see more clearly, and to listen to words less ambiguous than those of the Sibyl.

In the old days we imagined a world of gods where the harsh rules of compromise were not obeyed. But now this very world is seen as obscurantist and confused, contrasted with the exact and efficient world of the experts. “We are,” we say, “immersed in the habits of the past by our parents, our priests, and our politicians. Yet there is a way of knowing and acting which escapes from this confusion, absolutely by its principles and progressively by its results: this is a method, a single method, that of ‘science.’ ”

This is the way we have talked since Descartes, and there are few educated people on earth today who have not become Cartesian through having learned geometry, economics, accountancy, or thermodynamics. Everywhere we direct our best brains toward the extension of “science.” It is with them that we lodge our greatest, indeed often our only, hopes. Nowhere more than in the evocation of this kingdom of knowledge do we create the impression that there is another transcendental world. It is only here that there is sanctuary. Politics has no rights here, and the laws that rule the other worlds are suspended. This extraterritorial status, available only to the “sciences,” makes it possible for believers to dream, like the monks of Cluny, about reconquering the barbarians. “Why not rebuild this chaotic, badly organized world of compromise in accordance with the laws of our world?”

So what is this difference which, like Romulus and his plough, makes it possible to draw the limes that divide the scientific from other ways of knowing and convincing? A furrow, to be sure, an act of appropriation, an enclosure in the middle of nowhere, which follows up no “natural” frontier, an act of violence. Yes, it is another trial of strength which divides the forces putting might on one side and right on the other.

But surely this difference must represent something real since it is so radical, so total, and so absolute? Admittedly the credo of this religion is poor. All that it offers is a tautology. “To know” scientifically is to know “scientifically.” Epistemology is nothing but the untiring affirmation of this tautology. Abandon everything; believe in nothing except this: there is a scientific way of knowing, and other ways, such as the “natural,” the “social,” or the “magical.” All the failings of epistemology — its scorn of history, its rejection of empirical analysis, its pharisaic fear of impurity — are its only qualities, the qualities that are sought for in a frontier guard. Yes, in epistemology belief is reduced to its simplest expression, but this very simplicity brings success because it can spread easily, aided by neither priest nor seminary.

Of course, I am exaggerating. The faith has some kind of content. Technically, it is the negation of the paragraph with which I started this precis . Since the gods were destroyed, this faith has become the main obstacle that stands in the way of understanding the principle of irreduction. Its only function is passionately to deny that there are only trials of strength. “Be instant in season, out of season,” to say that “there is something in addition, there is also reason.” This cry of the faithful conceals the violence that it perpetrates, the violence of forcing this division.

All of which is to say that this precis, which prepares the way for the analysis of science and technology, is not epistemology, not at all.