15) Architecture molds our morality.
The word ethics comes from the Greek word ethos, which means custom or behavior. Ethics defines the way we do things and the way we act. The meaning of ‘ethics’ is more or less equivalent to that of ‘morals,’ which comes from the Latin ‘mos, moris’ and also means custom or behavior, but at a more personal level. Morals infer that ethical values are rather personal interpretations, deliberations or preferences and not general principles that can be proven true or false. Morality evolves, through decision-making and choices between what is right and what is wrong, just like any other field of human knowledge.
We have seen morality progress over time. In the Bible’s law, it was perfectly acceptable to own, beat, and rape your slaves. Some 2,500 years ago, members of one Greek city considered members of another Greek city to be sub-human and treated them that way. The bricks used by ancient Romans to build an arena in which gladiators would fight to their death for the public’s entertainment are still in place—and will be until the Coliseum crumbles.
The problem with morality, and therefore with human rights, is that not everyone agrees on what is moral: until there is some conventional acceptance as to what constitutes right or wrong, confusion will reign. For most of us the task of taking care of human rights is very definitely the responsibility of the government. We might have worries, we might have rage, we might have standards, but we expect legal and political enforcement from our representatives. That has to change.
Building is based on an embedded set of goals, values, functionality, and spatial relationships, and on a clearly defined set of environmental and social issues and priorities.
When we design to accommodate cars, we express a dominant vision of our values. Morality may be understood as our ability to model, sense, monitor, and set up a new form of design, one with humanity at its center. By doing so, we begin to imagine new goals for architecture. In a controlled society, values are well codified and require a critical mind, free of prejudice and open to new ways of thinking. What we can do is turn the problem on its head. Instead of asking “are we right, fair, just, or good persons?,” maybe we should ask “which is the right building process that ensures people will live safely and be good stewards of the Earth in the Anthropocene?” By reframing the question, we can focus on what’s wrongheaded about our current situation, and on finding alternative solutions. People throughout the world have different moral convictions. The real challenge is not moral pluralism, but the ability to translate ideals into a set of clearly defined solutions that can be interpreted and applied into architectural design.
We often use architecture not to solve the problems of social living but principally to serve the interests of a privileged minority. So those who have greater power in this globalized world are able to disproportionately influence the values of the age—including the ethics of their society, often through the alteration of the common space. The relationship between public and private space is the source of further ethical issues, which are important not only for the economy, but for all sectors of society.
Is homelessness just an accepted fact of urban life? To be ethical we have to learn to be deviant, because we could need to go against the conformity of prevailing values. We also need to avoid always seeing problems through a technological lens. If we push ourselves into inventing solutions for climate change, poverty, homelessness as visions for our futures, we are pushing ourselves into a moral evolution.
There are four ways I’d suggest by which ethics can drive architectural decisions:
Approaching each project from the question of its public interest
Focusing on sustainability, which means arresting and reversing the degradation of our planet, both natural and social
Fighting inequality, that is to say focusing on people rights and bring them into the space
Improving the participation of all, especially those in vulnerable situations
Ethical considerations always underpin how we design, plan, and build. They also underpin the vast majority of urban decisions. How do we account for architecture that endorses discrimination, racism, and aggressive or violent expansion? Again, in some important sense, these tendencies are built into the ethical system of our globalized world. Is being homeless just a matter of fact?
The need for a seismic shift in values exists at both the professional and individual level. The world is, was, and always will be filled with rights and wrongs. Power, or its abuse, often produces the greatest wrongs: intentionally harming people’s dignity, hurting people physically, destroying people’s morality, killing ideas, not to mention permitting crimes against humanity. Ethical issues include affordable housing, homelessness, the moral status of migrants, violence, and discrimination. Ethics are practical questions relating to daily life. Ethics help us get better solutions, and enable us to do our job better and to help us feel better when we do it.