Normative Ethics in Planning

Abstract

Normative ethics provide guidelines for deciding what makes right acts right. Planners who have written explicitly about ethics have taken a wide variety of approaches-descriptive, analytical, and normative. Normative approaches in planning have been shaped by the dispute in philosophy between two major approaches to ethics. Utilitarianism focuses on the goodness of consequences in deciding what is right. Deontological approaches focus on rules, rights, and actions that are right in themselves. Because neither of these approaches is fully satisfactory by itself; others have been developed that attempt to deal with particular weaknesses. Rule-utilitarianism and intuitionism are discussed here. Either could be thought of as the approach that underlies professional codes of ethics.