to gain acceptance of ‘their’ proposals, or to leak information to
outside groups who are fighting ‘their’ agency. Another set of
base findings about these situation ethics, and from the same
source, indicates that practitioners in public service differ
markedly one with another in their level of agency loyalty, in their
propensity to express personal values in their work, and also in
their willingness to promote political preferences in their job
context. Howe and Kaufman (1979) establish that ‘aside from a
fairly constant ten percent who were undecided’ and the somewhat equal
‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ respondents (totalling around 20 per cent) there was a
surprisingly high 70 per cent of hybrids ‘combining both the technical and
political dimensions of role’ which outnumbered the conservative and liberal
categories.
The tension this finding indicates for North American local government service
has its parallels elsewhere in the New World. I can identify, for example, that the
Australasian practitioner is as confused by what Howe and Kaufman describe as
official ‘role orientation’ on the one hand and ‘personal preferences’ on the other,
as are their North American counterparts.^14 This ambivalence may be ascribed to
deficient education, the absence of an appropriate professional canon, ambiguous
employer guidelines, and/or also to a lack of sound political leadership. The
largely unintended result is a high proportion of public servants in local govern-
ment who can be presumed to espouse ‘developer’ and ‘landowner’ preferences
personally, and to express these in their work to the likely disadvantage of the com-
munities they are paid to serve.
A British exploration of the attitudes and self-image of planners (Knox and
Cullen 1981) also establishes rapport with the New World circumstance in that
‘The average higher-echelon planner is very much a middle-class animal’. This
study explores and finds wanting the extent to which planners have the ‘public
good’ at heart. Even more telling, the Knox and Cullen study concludes that
British planners ‘may be seen as the functionaries of a political apparatus which
exercises its power to create a physical landscape in its own ideological image,
and to sustain a social environment conducive to its own preservation’.
These American and British indications open out onto a wider plane of
ethical concern and education, pointing up concerns about the ideological
baggage and the need for urban-rural and regional planners to have a set of
guiding ethics.Ethics is grounded in moral philosophy, and so the conservancy specialist and
also the development planner can dip into works as separate over time as Socrates
and Foucault. More to the contemporary point, the writings of Popper, Habermas
and Rawls (box 1.3) have now been connected into the neomodernist sustainable
urban planning ethos. This linkage has been pursued within several subject-
specific writings (Thomas and Healey 1991; Howe 1990; Beatley 1984 and 1994)
making the connection between philosophy, sociology and planning. In this way,
additional to the largely utilitarian thrust of development, it is possible for both
students and practitioners alike to fashion a link with deontological (moral duty-32 Principles
InEveryday Ethics for
PlannersCarol Barrett
(2002) profiles the
practical, personal,
agency and guild ethics
which constitute issues
of confusion within real-
context situations.