Conference Topics
Papers on ethics and the contemporary built environment will be presented at the conference. Papers are expected to address questions of the following kind, where the first and last questions are exactly as posed for the 1999 Conference:
- What kinds of built environment should we be engaged in? What kinds of buildings, towns, cities, and so on should we create - and why? In particular, are there certain kinds of morally relevant virtues, principles, or outcomes that we think our building/s should express, instil, adhere to, or promote? What are they?
- The last ten years have heightened concerns for environmental sustainability. The last year or so has also made us acutely aware of the issues of economic and social sustainability. How far has architecture, engineering and planning in the last decade genuinely addressed these issues in ethically defensible ways?
- Have we seen any progress in the coalescence of ethics and the built environment into something like a coherent subdiscipline? What would constitute progress, and what factors are holding back progress? What courses of action might help it get off the ground?
- How can future professionals be educated with the knowledge, attitudes and values that will genuinely promote sustainability in the next decade?
- The 1999 conference asked: Can we talk about the ethics of the built environment as a matter of concern in its own right (as opposed, say, to the aesthetics of building)? In his book ‘A Theory of General Ethics’ (MIT Press, 2006) Warwick Fox argues that we can. What are the implications of Fox’s advocacy of a ‘General Ethics’ for built environment practices? What arguments are there for other or counter views?
- Can the questions raised by a consideration of the ethics of building serve to illuminate questions concerning how we should regard the "natural" environment (and thereby shed light upon central problems in environmental ethics as it has been developed to date)? And vice versa?
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