SAPE : some architectural publications and ethics which requires the positing of a meta-ethics of Architecture

The scholarly journals of architecture are a likely rich source to mine for matters of ethical concern pertinent to architecture. The thesis launches from this premise and develops a research tool, grounded in corpus linguistics and content analysis, to identify words in the essays of four important scholarly journals that are placeholders for matters of ethical concern. The result of this word-mining is the Ethical Universal Scholar of Architecture (Eusa). She is invited into the text of the thesis to make her own commentary on matters in general, and specifically on her four most important matters of ethical concern. Her commentary is interesting enough but if left here the thesis would leave itself open to the criticism that its findings are only constituted by the author's common sense, and Eusa's limited universe, which shows no knowledges of contemporary ethical discourse. For an informed discourse to continue an intellectual framework is required and this ought to be a Meta-ethics of architecture. From the literature it is readily apparent that this does not exist and, encouraged by a call from a few authors for such a construct, the thesis temporarily sets Eusa aside, and goes about to design and construct this Meta-ethics. The thesis, on sound historic grounds, defines the necessary and sufficient conditions for an entity to be named architecture to be that it must be both practical shelter and art. It now appropriates Rorty's propositions on liberal society and axiomatically names the Meta-ethics of architecture as the structure that, in the first place, separates practical shelter and art and deems them incommensurable. It names them the Creative Ethics and the Practical Ethics of architecture. Having done this it observes that architecture, because of its means of production, the material of its medium, and the immutability of the completed concrete artefact, is unlike other art forms and demands that decisions be made in the face of the self created incommensurables of the Practical and Creative Ethics. To effect this, the thesis turns to the affective valuing of Elizabeth Anderson, whilst not ignoring the limited usefulness of consequentualist ethics, makes the central claim that it is not irrational to make decisions and then act on them on the basis of the way we feel, provided we open them up for inter-subjective agreement. Eusa's is returned to, and her utterances, her fragments of texts, her four most important matters of ethical concern are re-interrogated to enable them to be located in the meta-ethics of architecture. This is done and the matrix is cross tabulated with the way she deploys, most probably in ignorance, affective valuing to adequately express her feelings towards the things that matter. The contents of the matrix are considered closely to identify where incommensurability, exists and then to deploy the affective reading of Eusa's utterances to ascertain if it does, or could, effect reconciliation. This is the test of the Meta-ethics in praxis, enabled by affective valuing