Spector, Tom

English

PhilPapers

Winter 2009 439REVIEWSRobert Mugerauer and Lynne Manzo. Environmental Dilemmas: Ethical Decision Making. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2008. xxi, 387 pages.  A serious hazard for any ethically motivated environmental design professional (architect, landscape architect, planner, civil engineer) is that consideration of the impacts and ripple effects over time of environmental design decisions can be so far-reaching that one’s ethical concerns become paralyzing. Clearly, however, the tendency to lock down and avoid all design intervention is counterproductive because it’s precisely the environmental design professional with attuned ethical sympathies that the world needs making these decisions. While for some “do noth-ing” becomes the default choice in the face of such grave uncertainty, others will tend to overcompensate by rejecting all distant claims as extraneous. What ethically minded environmental design professionals need from a text, then, is not more proscriptions piled on the already staggering heap of considerations, but instead help cutting through the clutter to develop resilience in the face of uncertainty and the conceptual tools to solidify a broad, robust middle ground between the cold rejection of third-party claims and a paralyzing susceptibility to all claimants. This is what we need, but this is not quite what this book provides.  The aim of University of Washington professors Mugerauer and Manzo, in the book’s six chapters and various appendices, seems to be instead to redefine the previously fractured field of environmental design ethics into a coherent whole, and in this they have been remarkably successful.  In chapter one, the common nature of the environmental dilemma is unfolded. While previous authors have tended to focus on the uniqueness of each discipline’s ethical milieu, Mugerauer and Manzo emphasize, instead, the common nature of the design dilemmas each must face: they are characterized by choices between alternate goods in which some legitimate claimants will be winners and others losers and would benefit from the same strategies of imaginatively “reframing differences,” dissolving dichotomies, “accepting uncertainty and controversy,” and learning to live with the “continuously unfolding character of social decision processes” (p. 24).  In chapter two, the discussion turns to the ethical milieu of the environmental design professions. Although they survey many approaches to ethics, from Bud-dhist to utilitarian and much in-between, the authors’ advice generally adheres to a form of moral particularism (though they never use that term) less interested in applying rules and principles and instead “mindful of the complexities that unfold around place and address ethics in unique and context-sensitive ways” (p. 60).  Before turning to an exposition of the major moral theories in chapter four, the authors set such ground rules for ethical decision making in chapter three as au-tonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, veracity, fidelity, and confidentiality which establish a legitimate framework for exercising the designer’s moral discretion. Chapter five discusses the ethics of the sustainability movement, in what should be in light of the moral theories discussed in chapter four, but, strangely, fails to ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS440 Vol. 31build on that chapter. The final section comparing the various codes of ethics of the allied environmental design professions, which I was dreading in anticipation of a dry recitation, turned out to be the best chapter, lively and with a keen sense of the ways in which each stands to inform the other. If professors of environmental design and engineering ethics are looking to incorporate a section of the book into a reader, this chapter would be the one. Questions arise about the book’s ultimate purpose and intended audience. The authors stated intent is a book organized as a “hypertext . . . [in which] one could start anywhere and then move to any other chapter, and the ideas would be coher-ent and make sense” (p. xviii), but this is not a felicitous way to organize a course which must to some extent operate longitudinally. Further, the authors’ method of text-embedded references in the social sciences format (author, year) is both distracting and assumes too much reader familiarity with the literature for what otherwise seems aimed as an introductory or basic text on the subject. If the discus-sion is going to liberally sprinkle itself with references (and it must be said, they are wonderfully comprehensive—a boon for instructors of applied ethics if not for students), the place, context, and importance of the referred authors needs to be established unless one assumes an already-familiar reader. On the other hand, why would well-versed readers want yet another survey of the major ethical theories as provided in chapter four? Furthermore, better use could have been made of the case studies in the appendices. With the exception of one lengthy one, they are short enough to have been integrated in the chapters where they would have pro-vided some desirable illustration of the ideas discussed. Finally, the book would have benefitted from an enthusiastic proofing. It’s not good, for instance, when the number of unclosed parentheticals becomes so pronounced that one starts counting them.  Thus, Environmental Dilemmas comes up with a mixed report card. On the one hand, it does a real service by showing that the diverse environmental design professions have more similarities than differences when it comes to ethical reason-ing. On the other hand, much like the dilemma often facing design professionals themselves, it’s difficult to say just who the relevant audience is.Tom Spector* * School of Architecture, 101 Donald W. Reynolds, School of Architecture Building, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK 74078; email: tom.spector@okstate.edu.

Environmental Dilemmas: Ethical Decision Making

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