Ethical self-determination against the grain
Patrik Schumacher, London 2024
Afterword to Five Critical Essays on Architectural Ethics, Austin Williams (Editor), TRG Publishing, London 2024
This group of essays goes against the grain of the increasingly moralising tendency in our discipline. This tendency echoes a general societal trend, imposing ready-made values like sustainability, inclusion and diversity, as Dennis Hayes observes in his contribution. These values demand allegiance and active confirmation at every occasion. James Woudhuysen writes about “the misplaced ethics around Net Zero” and corporate hypocrisy in his contribution with the title “Moral Grandstanding”. Renier de Graaf, in his recent book ‘architect verb’, is our ally in this push-back. He laments that the imposed, obligatory moralising themes crowd out a genuine architectural discourse. De Graaf calls this ‘Profspeak’ in allusion to Orwell’s notion of ‘Newspeak’. Alan Dunlop, in his contribution, talks about the “cult of DEI”, “enforced conformity and self-censorship” and an “ethically correct language police”. Eleanor Jolliffe points out and criticizes the telling fact that in 2019 the RIBA code of conduct increased in volume by 900%, and is now much more imposing in “requiring positive action” from its members. She is worried that here the code of conduct starts “crossing the line from upholding ethical practice in delivering architectural services, to policing the moral and ethical framework of individuals and of society.” What happens in the new 2019 RIBA code of conduct has been happening in architectural academia for much longer: the overburdening of our discipline with moral issues like social justice that cannot be solved within the confines of the discipline’s remit and thereby implies an overreach in competency that is both infeasible and illegitimate. This is not only a question of missing expertise but ignores the fact that all architectural projects and project purposes are initiated and defined outside of the discipline, prior to the architect’s engagement.
Dennis Hayes rightly objects that issues like sustainability, inclusion and diversity are posited “as moral duties with no sense of an alternative perspective”. There are no arguments put forward. These values are taken for granted and are immune to criticism. Strangely, this dogmatism goes hand in hand with a prevailing moral relativism. To make sense of this we need to call out the intruding moralising agenda more specifically: identity politics, a worldview more recently referred to as ‘woke’. It is this ideology that plagues our discipline, as well as wider society. This ideology is contradictory. Wokeism can sustain its contradictory ways by the aggressive, self-righteous moral disqualification of its critics. The insistence on an open-ended diversity of equally legitimate group identities and forms of life is at the heart of this ideology. The underlying framing of all social ills is based on the schema of oppressor/oppressed meant to explain differences in group success. While Hayes is not naming wokeism directly, he is calling out the flaw of moral relativism in a way that implies woke ideology as the target: where “all ideas are equally valid, we need never put forward any reasons or justifications”. That a contradictory wokeism is the target becomes even clearer in the next paragraph: “The adoption of such a relativist position means that our moral or cultural worldview is reduced to something that is protected from criticism and challenge. Indeed, any criticism or challenge is likely to be met with hostility, censorship, or the sack, giving lie to the idea that relativism is an open, kindly and inclusive philosophy.”
The correct response here is, as Hayes rightly suggests, to allow criticism free reign. Criticism of ideas, of positions, of proposed or applied moral values should neither be construed as ad hominem hostility, nor therefore be met with hostility. It should be welcomed as contribution in a societal learning process. Unrestricted debate, openness to criticism and the quest for the better arguments is indeed the conditio sine qua non of any rational endeavour, including professional self-regulation, or wider societal ethical self-determination. However, I would like to argue here that we can and should go two steps further than Hayes.
First: As Karl-Otto Apel and Juergen Habermas have convincingly argued, this readiness to let open discourse, rather than dogma or power, shape the shared systems of values that order societal life, already contains a very basic, general set of moral commitments, namely the commitment to the social structure and ethical principles that are constitutive preconditions or criteria of the very institution of rational discourse (including science). Before the recent woke erosion of modern discourse culture, Habermas’ Discourse Ethics indeed offered a compelling reflective self-confirmation of the morality of modernity, updating Kant’s earlier reflective affirmation by positing an actually instituted deliberative communication process, as substitute for Kantian self-consciousness as transcendental subject. That woke ideology is no longer, not even implicitly, adhering to the principles of discourse ethics, shows that it implies a devastating regression behind the achievements of the enlightenment which made both modern material freedom (prosperity) and modern social freedom (individual liberty) possible. Apel/Habermas refute the philosophical doctrine of moral relativism by pointing out that discourse ethics is universally presupposed by all discourse. Its denial within philosophical discourse is therefore a ‘performative’ contradiction. This refutation does not, of course, deny the reality of societies who’s prevailing morality violates the principles of discourse ethics. However, it does deny the rational possibility of a philosophical, discursive defence of such a morality, and it thereby it also denies the coherence of the philosophical claim that all moral systems are equally valid. In any event, moral systems that violate the principles of discourse ethics, i.e. virtually all pre-modern forms of morality, have been shielding themselves against criticism via censorship. The same applies now to woke morality.
Second: The fact that the principles of discourse ethics are a universally implied by all modern societies that value philosophy, science, knowledge, free debate etc. does leave ample room for the variable further detailed elaboration of ethical life and moral sensibilities beyond the very general, abstract framing determinations of discourse ethics. This is borne out by the 300 years of historical ethical evolution of modern enlightened societies, always accompanied by critical ethical debate, including book-length treatises. That concrete moral sensibilities have momentously evolved since 1800 is evident. I would like to propose that this discursively steered ethical evolution was (and remains) adaptively bound up with the momentous technological and socio-economic transformations of social life. What is also clear is that there is ample scope for local adaptive variations in the historically evolving ethical best practice, in accordance with the world division of labour. This includes differences in the professional ethics of different professions. These local or sector specific differentiated moralities are, to be sure, embedded in a global moral framework that regulates communications that transcend regional and professional boundaries.
My formulation of ethical best practice ties moral principles and sensibilities to the historically specific conditions of economic progress or productivity gains. Therefore, I argue, that for the historically specific determination of the current ethical best practice, the recent socio-economic transformation from Fordist mechanical mass production to a Postfordist network- and knowledge economy, accompanied by the neo-liberal revolution in the realm of politics, is decisive. The work-and life-processes have dramatically changed in this transformation, calling for a different ethics, transformed social relations, personality structures, virtues, ideals, aspirations etc. I can only give a few hints via catch-phrases here: entrepreneur vs bureaucrat, self-directedness vs obedience, opportunity vs loyalty, self-reliance vs solidarity, flexibility vs predictability, creativity vs reliability, disruption vs continuity, freedom vs security, meritocracy vs equity, charity vs entitlement, cosmopolitan vs national etc. My argument is that the left backlash since 2008 against the 1980s neo-liberal revolution is regressive, and that wokeism is the latest, devastating stage in this regressive ethical trajectory, throwing us back into a highly maladaptive, nearly premodern ethical condition (as might be gleaned from the fact that woke ideology defends premodern ideologies like fundamentalist Islam against enlightenment-based criticisms). For me, ethical self-determination against the grain therefore means the promotion of a libertarian ethics that embraces and facilitates competitive capitalism as innovation and prosperity engine.