Can a bridge be unethical?

So yeah, with the right (or rather: wrong) mindset you can make bridges unethical. I'd argue you could make anything unethical if you tackle it with enough destructive energy.

The fascinating thing with the right is, that their goals¹ are so unethical, they know that just openly defending why you did a certain thing won't fly. So it is always some harmless excuse, always somebody elses fault, always by accident rather than by design. While the rest of society takes truth, open discourse and compromise as ways of finding common ground, these people see truth and discourse as a weakness, they would rather rule than represent.

¹: getting "rid" of people they have othered, while finding new people to other so people stay unified (which is not a sustainable approach as history has shown)

Also calls to mind the expression "wrong side of the tracks", which (I believe) originates directly from the idea you have a railway keeping the poor away from the rich.

Being America, of course, race takes forefront rather than poverty.

This concept of shouldering bothers me. I imagine a thought process like "as a designer, I am highly influential! I must carry the burden of morality on my shoulders for the good of humanity! (And possibly animals too, it's my duty to decide things like that!) It's all up to me! I'm so important!"

To the extent that this is true, the situation is aggravated by being tasked with designing public works, where pleasing everybody is a fool's errand and opinions cause trouble. But I don't want a designer (perhaps one who has stumbled into wielding government authority) to try to take it all on. I want designers to think about morality, sure, and certainly to do what they personally care about, but not to go shopping for it with a view to "what good can I do here", because that would just be being a do-gooder. If your reaction to discovering that your project has an ethical dimension is to duck and cover, I think you have good instincts.

> we need to make ethics an intentional part of our process. Not just to avoid unintended harm, but also to do good.

But this sounds awful. I don't want designers to be the arbitrators of good, because I don't think they'd be any good at it. Other than the personal beliefs that a designer has been incubating for a lifetime, I don't think other people's moral quandaries are a designer's business, and I don't think they should be encouraged to be bigger-headed.

In fact I don't want anybody to be the arbitrator of good, which is something the article alludes to by mentioning how difficult it is (although it doesn't seem to want to admit that nudge theory exists). I want a marketplace of small, uninfluential decisions and diverse choices by users, not centrally managed megaprojects where the designer has substantial influence on public thought. I want an almost subliminal culture of uncontroversial ethical choices to emerge naturally, so that we all learn to hold ethical values as a result of millions of unimportant design-idiots making foolish choices that may succeed or may be shot down. Fortunately, this is how it already mostly works.