COP Lecture - Themes: Ethics - What is Good?

This is the lecture I have been looking forward to, because growing and up and through out my teenage life I always read and learn't about what being a moral person is; and I never got to share and discuss this with anyone. So it was nice a finally hear somebody else's view on the whole idea. Unfortunately I wasn't sure I totally agreed.

The lecture investigated different methods of which we can judge if we are being ethical and moral or not and all though they were showed to be floored, I believe that being ethical is a mixture of all these different methods and is ever changing. It isn't just what you yourself believe or what social constructs dictate or for the common good. You have to work in a balance around the whole thing, sometimes you must do something that isn't really ethical but for different reasons. When you can learn to be a good person electively, justify why and act between each of these ideas that's when you will become truly, ethical; because that's really all life is about, achieving a balance.

Lecture Notes

We live in a fundamentally unjust society. How can we live in a fair system ethically.

First Things First - Garland (1964)
Signed by famous creative practitioners. Produced in the boom of consumerism. Creative designers were wasting their talent on marketing pointless products, and how they are exploited.

First Things First - Adbusters (2000)
Advocate revolution, sabatage signs and highjacking air time. A journal of the mental environment. In this re draft the tone changes to not cry about wasting talent, it gets much more venomous especially against advertisers.

Paragraph "We, the undersigned, are graphic designers" they say design is about getting money and getting paid

FtF - Just Make It
Youre in all indocturanted in to designing for pointless stuff, accusing us of being complicit in a corrupt system. Marketing a credit card ecourages a life time of debt.

You're actually changing the way people talk to each other and act socially.

How do you judge worthy and what is unworthy, it stays to become  doctorial and  judgemental. "We propose a reversal of prioritrd in favour of more useful, lasting and democratic forms of communication"

If you work for companies who make any sort of consumer item you perpetuate it, and this unethical.

Culture Jamming
Meme Warfare
Sabotaging adverts and billboards

Famous and rich designers signed their manifesto. They don't have yo worry about their next job and can easily look down their nose.

If idea was switched to consumerism rather than against advertising. Its not really unethical to work for whoever you like. What is, is the system of exploitation that allows it to happen. This manifesto is a little more arrogant.

The idea is better to aim at doing more your talents something worth change.

"Potent memes can change minds, alter behaviour, catalyse collective mind shifts, and transform cultures."

Its almost wrong to use designers as a means to an end e.g. over throw capitalism.

Victor Papanek 'Most things are designed not for the needs of the people but for the needs of manufacturers to sell to people' (1983:43)

Papanek Beer Can Bumper, 1971
[Get Picture]

"The Design Problem"
The designers share - 10%
the real problem - 90%

How do we determine what is Good?

However there is a way to be ethical in a corrupt capitalist societ.

Subjective Relativism
Go about the world in the way I see fit. There are no universal norms or right and wrong.

Cultural Relativism
Be ethical based on the time period and where you are. Of course this is floored it can't marry differences between cultures.

Diving Command Theory
Its not based on reason but dogma.

Kantianism
Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804)
We have reason, we rationlise first. We are transcendent as a species. One of first people to try formulate on what is ethical or not. A system of principals, the categorical imperitve.

Categorical Imperative
Whatever you do think through these before you act.

Think logically, if you can universalise your thought through logic then its ethical. Act for an end - not a means to an end.

Ultiliarianism (John Stuart Mill)
If it increased total happiness, advtange, pleasure and total benefit.

Social Contract Theory
Thomas Hobbs and Jean Jacques Rousseau

If everyone did what they want it would be a constant competition. It argues that basically to be ethical is to think about the common more than useful gain.

Socially and Ecologically Responsible Design

Social Tithe
Pro Bono - 10%
Salaried Work - 90%

We should devote 10% of our time to really worth while ethical causes.


Statistics (Go check them and discuss) cow is worth more than a sub-saharan African.