Built Environment, Ethics and the

Abstract

This article provides an overview of a selection of different ethical viewpoints and theories that may inform the planning and designing of the built environment. It concentrates on ethical positions that have actually informed, or may potentially inform, the practices of urban planning and architecture. The article opens by describing the application of utilitarian ethics to two cases of major planning ‘infrastructure’ projects. Rawls’s critique of utilitarianism and his own egalitarian theory of justice is then described, followed by Robert Nozick’s alternative theory of social justice grounded in just entitlements or desert. Although they represent rival theories of justice, both Rawls and Nozick draw on ethical presuppositions first expounded by Immanuel Kant, and so the article connects Rawls’s and Nozick’s theories of social justice with Kant’s ethics. A quite different approach to ethics – virtue ethics – is then described and connected with the ‘professional ethics’ of urban planners and architects. The article concludes with a brief note on environmental ethics.