"Morally Indefensible" Motors
Randy Cohen, author of New York Times Magazine column The Ethicist, recently appeared with Mark Gorton of StreetFilms & The Open Planning Project to briefly discuss transportation ethics. Take a look.
No Impact Man offers a blow-by-blow breakdown of Cohen’s ideas, and the Cranked Magazine blog offers some keen foresight into where this video leads. This is the kind of practical philosophy I want to study; the kind of ethical inquiry that actually cashes out at the end of the day. As much as I vent against the dominant automotive culture, I’ve never felt comfortable calling it morally bankrupt. Listening to Cohen though, he makes it seem much easier to divine. Granted the case of traffic in NYC may be a bit of an outlier, but I feel as though many of the points raised can be applied in less dense areas.
For example, Gorton suggests that “the biggest problem with the city based on the automobile is actually invisible. It’s the city you don’t see, the city that could be if it wasn’t that way.” What he’s moving towards is the idea that there are many systematic, and cultural edifices that in one way or another threaten the health and happiness of the people within, and that unfortunately these impositions upon quality of life are readily accepted as “the way things are”.
In a city like Chico, with an urban population of just over 105k people, I’d like to imagine we’re imbued with a bit more flexibility.
Urban planning is one field that is increasingly interesting to me, as it deals with the en masse day-to-day actions and decisions of a population and the profound impacts they have on each other and the environment. There aren’t too many mental degrees of separation between this and a world view reaching for a sustainable ethic.