Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

On Being Stuck: Looking For The Limits Of Ethics In The Built Environment, Robert Kirkman, Douglas S. Noonan

Douglas S. Noonan

We seek here to lay the groundwork for a multi-disciplinary inquiry into one aspect of the phenomenology of moral experience, which is a general project of elucidating what it is like for people to make ethical decisions in particular contexts. Taking urban and suburban environments as the context for decision making, we focus in particular on the common human experience of being stuck. Just as a person can get physically stuck while trying to crawl through a hole that is too small, people can get ethically stuck when some feature of their relationship with their context blocks or deflects their …