1.2  Semio-Ethical Diagnosis through ‘Design’ Research

 

Enter semio-ethics, which seeks to relate the study of signs with values in various ways, and which has received much attention in the semiotic research community (Petrilli, 2010). Indeed Susan Petrilli points to semio-ethics as “part of the answer to the question regarding the future of semiosis, the destiny of semiosis” (Petrilli, 2010: 25). Petrilli’s election as the Seventh Sebeok Fellow is premised on her contributions to semioethics, her “signature issue” (Deely, 2010: vii), and hence an endorsement of that view in the semiotic scholarly community.  Petrilli and Ponzio (2010: 150) have both intimated that a semio-ethical study of conceptual signs and their axiological and practical dimensions is inevitably diagnostic and akin to symptomatology (semeiotics) (ibid.). Elsewhere, with examples in ‘law’ and ‘education’ (Chua, 2006; 2012b; also see Finnis 1980), I have explained how the development of focal meanings – a strategy that I have labeled ‘significal’ or semio-ethical designing/translations (Chua 2012b) to gesture its affinity with the semio-ethical stance – reveals simultaneously the peripheral and defective meanings, often with analytic disclosures of the natures of such defects. Evidently then, (design) research aimed at developing focal meanings (of ‘design’), one should say, are semio-ethical studies, and, one can infer, would have diagnostic qualities.

 

Indeed, Dilnot’s – if I may, significal or semio-ethical – writing about ‘design’ as a criticality is not just an inclusively researched account of how ‘design’s’ epistemology ought to be critical of the deficiencies in the current economy, which is then consequently problematized as something to be solved through ‘design’.  It is simultaneously an account of the ‘designer’, whose ethically critical epistemology should have framed his design problems.  In that case, Dilnot’s (2008) description of what it means to ‘design’ is at once a study of what it means to be a ‘designer’ and how one can fail to be a ‘designer’, by failing to embody criticality “as a state of being”, which as Dilnot explained is eschewed because hard to come into view both in research and in professional practice.  Meaning then, Dilnot’s account of what ‘design’ is at the same time offers explanatory insights into how and why such professional designers fail to be ‘designers’ and how they end up in the periphery, servicing an unjust capital.  It says to such a designer who seeks to solve his client’s problems: physician, first heal thyself.

 

This said, I think his diagnosis of the design profession is incomplete, and would like to press for a more comprehensive explanation of the symptomatic lack of critical designers in the profession. If the economic milieu in which we are situated seems so amoral, and yet designers so eschew criticality but instead unreflectively placate consumer wants signaled by the market, this is not necessarily simply because their moral critical viewpoint is difficult to come into view in design, but rather also because such a moral, critical viewpoint is thought of as that which should not come into view. Meaning, it is not just that the critical is less attractive and thus displaced, but that it is completely discredited. There are at least two reasons for this.

 

Firstly, certain meta-ethical commitments deny ethically robust normative claims any veritability; in the case of Herbert Simon for instance, even with the renunciation of an earlier adherence to positivism which makes nonsense of ought-claims, his affirmation of the naturalistic fallacy led him to suggest that there is no way to derive ethical norms (see Chua, forthcoming 2014).  Fortunately, such philosophical meta-ethical theses may be overcome, for instance, with moral theories like new natural law theory (ibid.), articulated representatively in John Finnis’ Natural Law and Natural Rights (1980), which makes a case for putatively normative precepts pointing to basic goods worth seeking for their own sakes, whilst affirming the naturalistic fallacy and accepting that robust, non-instrumental normative claims cannot logically be derived from merely descriptive ones.

 

Secondly, and less often mentioned, but no less a challenge: the critical consciousness is conceptually undermined by theological (or metaphysical) shifts in history and in the current. Historically a voluntarist theology exalted the autonomous secular.  This came by way of the late medieval post-Scotistic, Occamist man, made after the image of God – specifically, the capricious individual imaged after a capricious God and His factum. Such a man has to be given full dominium over his private space and property (Milbank, 2006; Gillispie, 2008; also Coleman, 2012: 87-88), and as the latter progressively enlarged, it displaced even the otherwise bindingly natural moral law prescribing his duty to aid others in need. Indeed according to John Milbank’s (ibid) historical analysis in his Theology and Social Theory (2006),  neo-liberal secularism, which is manifested by an adherence to the violent pressures of wants signaled by the market without moral guidance, is rooted precisely in this voluntarist theology.  If this historical-sociological observation leads to a charge of the genetic fallacy and the objection is made that what in the past displaced the critical may no longer do so in the present (and perhaps rightly so), then note also that in the current, the secular or atheistic non-affirmation or denial of an embarrassing theist metaphysics or theist natural theology continues philosophically to undermine any substantively ethical or normative theory, which derives its normative stability only through the concomitant defense of a non-capricious God who is responsible for the intelligent design of man’s morally relevant epistemic capacities (Chua, 2006b; 2008; in press; also see Rea, 2002).   Therefore, the concept of “public” responsibilities (c.f. Dilnot, 2008) still is being undermined when confronted with the defense of private spheres, only that warrants for a secular autonomy now take the form of a cultural atheism which subjects ‘moral obligations’ to derision.[1]

 

In this respect, ‘design’ that is ethically critical ends up incoherent for the designer so long as the respect for the autonomous secular trumps and displaces the bindingly moral, whether this autonomous secularism continues to find warrant in a past heretical voluntarist theology even if trimmed down for contemporary audiences, which James March’s Quixotesque  romantic logics of appropriateness seems dangerously to have re-incarnated (see Chua, in press); or whether it currently thrives because the ethically critical is undermined precisely by the refusal to affirm a natural theology of a non-capricious God, as the militant atheism of a Richard Dawkins makes so clear, in spite of his hopes for human morality which are unfortunately ultimately nothing but pie-in-the-sky wishes on behalf of good morals without theoretical backbone (Chua, 2008).

 

Conversely, a focal ‘designer’ epistemology for which an ethical criticality is not in vain is one which will reject the respect for the autonomous secular. But this can be rejected only if these (as Milbank calls them) “heretical” theologies (of God or without God) and their implied anthropologies and implications for morality are opposed, or else an alternative to these offered (see Chua, in press), in the context of an inclusive design research programme, drawing inter-disciplinarily on results of theological or metaphysical research (also see DeHart, 189-194; like him I disagree with Milbank’s dismissal of metaphysics or natural law theory).  

 

Hence, amonsgt ‘designers’, one further differentiation is required: for there are ‘designers’ who whist initially critical are meta-ethically and metaphysically or theologically ill-informed and therefore whose ‘meta’ commitments dismantle their purported criticality, versus, those ‘designers’ whose meta-ethical and metaphysical (theological) world-view harmonize well with their ethical criticality or else critically reject metaphysical commitments that undermine the robustly moral.  It is the latter ‘designer’ that better fits the notion of a ‘designer’ in its focal meaning, and whose ‘design’ epistemology enables him to engage, with a coherence and cogent criticality, the tendency of any design-profession to serve any unjust pressures of the market.