47.3.haji

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Ishtiyaque Haji, Stefaan E. Cuypers, Yannick Joye

The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Volume 47, Number 3, Fall 2013,pp. 1-23 (Article)

P bl h d b n v r t f ll n PrDOI: 10.1353/jae.2013.0018

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Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 47, No. 3, Fall 2013 © 2013 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Ishtiyaque Haji, professor of philosophy at the University of Calgary, is the author of articles in metaphysics, ethics, and action theory; and of the books Moral Apprais-ability (1998), Deontic Morality and Control (2002), Moral Responsibility, Authenticity, and Education (2008, coauthored with S. Cuypers), Incompatibilism’s Allure (2009), and Freedom and Value (2009).

Stefaan E. Cuypers is professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. He works in philosophy of mind and philosophy of education. His research interests are autonomy, moral responsibility, and R. S. Peters. He is the author of Self-Identity and Personal Autonomy (2001); the coauthor, together with Ishtiyaque Haji, of Moral Responsibility, Authenticity, and Education (2008); the coeditor, together with Christopher Martin, of Reading R. S. Peters Today: Analysis, Ethics and the Aims of Edu-cation (2011); and an invited contributor to The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Educa-tion (2009), edited by Harvey Siegel.

Yannick Joye (PhD, University of Ghent, 2007) currently works as a full-time postdoc-toral researcher at the Research Centre for Marketing and Consumer Science, Univer-sity of Leuven. He is mainly involved in research on (evolutionary) environmental aesthetics and in empirical environmental psychology research. Dr. Joye has pub-lished in Environment and Planning B, Review of General Psychology, and Environmental Values, among others.

Architecture, Ethical Perception, and Educating for Moral Responsibility

ISHTIYAQUE HAJI, STEFAAN E. CUYPERS, AND YANNICK JOYE

Introduction

Architecture has a marked influence on ethical perception. Ethical percep-tion, in turn, has a pronounced influence on what we are morally respon-sible for, our decisions, choices, intentional omissions, and overt actions, for instance. It thus stands to reason that architecture bears saliently on moral responsibility. If we now introduce a widely accepted premise that one of the fundamental aims of education is to see that our children turn into mor-ally responsible agents, we can further infer that architecture has an influ-ence on educating for moral responsibility. Our primary aims in this paper are, first, to uncover associations between architecture and ethical percep-tion, on the one hand, and moral responsibility, on the other, that we believe are significant, and, second, to begin to show how these associations are connected with educating for responsibility.

The paper unfolds in this way: We first outline an Aristotelian account of moral perception according to which an agent is responsible for how she morally perceives her situation (section 1). We then discuss the impact of architectural design and lifestyles on ethical perception (section 2). Fi-nally, we argue for the close connection between architecture and moral responsibility—especially responsibility’s agency requirement—against the backdrop of our Aristotelian account of moral perception. Appreciating this connection is key to understanding architecture’s influence on educating for moral responsibility (section 3).

1. An Aristotelian Account of Moral Perception

We begin with an outline of what ethical perception is. We fix on the concept, first, by giving examples of perceiving that count, or that many have taken to count, as central instances of ethical perception and, second, focusing on elements of an Aristotelian view of such perception, as these elements are of central importance in what follows. Perceptions of moral right and wrong are taken to qualify as ethical perceptions. In a famous example that Gilbert Harman discusses, a person comes around a corner and sees a group of young hoodlums pour gaso-line on a cat and ignite it. Harman writes, “[Y]ou do not need to conclude that what . . . [the hoodlums] are doing is wrong; you do not need to figure anything out. You can see that it is wrong.”1 Commenting on this example, Charles Starkey remarks that the wrongness

strikes us immediately and verisimilarly, in the same manner as our other perceptions. We use normative concepts of rightness and wrong-ness in our recognition of situations just as we use non-normative con-cepts in such recognition. In this way it seems more like a perception and less like a judgment or deliberate inference that torturing the cat is wrong.2

We may supplement Starkey’s observation with the Aristotelian point that an individual who is properly morally trained should recognize or perceive that the act of torturing the hapless cat is morally wrong; by virtue of his deficient moral training, one of the hoodlums may not see the act as wrong. A perception that another person is in need of, for instance, sympathy or help qualifies as a moral perception. Beth Dixon presents us with the follow-ing illustrative case:

[I]f I see a long line of people waiting to be admitted to a housing shelter for the night I might form the belief that they are all drug ad-dicts, criminals, or lacking in initiative. Construing the situation in this particular way may prevent me from acknowledging that those who need housing may deserve my sympathy and help. Indeed focus-

2 Haji, Cuypers, and Joye

ing on how unkempt they appear may obscure the fact that there are children and their mothers waiting in line to stay somewhere for the night. There may be more than one way of describing what matters ethically in a situation, and these different descriptions of a scene may contain equally compelling but competing ethical considerations.3

As Dixon suggests, moral perception may also involve distorted self-per-ception, for instance, in cases in which one sees oneself as kind or generous when one is really acting to satisfy one’s apt, unconscious self-interested motivations. Starkey presents us with another revealing illustration of ethical per-ception he finds in Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good.4 He claims that Murdoch regards ethical perception as the compassionate perception of someone as she really is. In Murdoch’s example, we are to consider the change in perception of a woman who initially sees her daughter-in-law as “pert and familiar, insufficiently ceremonious, brusque, sometimes posi-tively rude, always tiresomely juvenile.” The woman is capable of self-crit-icism and “giving careful and just attention to an object [for example, the daughter-in-law] which confronts her.”5 In directing such attention to her daughter-in-law, the woman comes to question her initial attitudes toward her. Starkey claims that, consequently, the woman’s vision of her daughter-in-law changes: as Murdoch remarks, the woman is seen as “not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous, not noisy but gay, not tiresomely juvenile but delightfully youthful.”6 Starkey adds that “empathetic perception can be placed in the same camp as sympathetic perception . . . because the goal of both is a point of view that is charitable toward another person.”7

A taxing philosophical exercise is to start with what appear to be such un-controversial examples of ethical perception and then tease out from them, or construct, an analysis of such perception that, among other things, would distinguish ethical perception from nonethical perception.8 Fortunately, for our purposes, we do not have to defend an analysis of something’s being an ethical perception. Instead, we pay particular attention, first, to some elements of an Aristotelian account of moral perception and, then, say some general things about the relevant features of a person who has developed her capac-ity of such perception. According to Aristotle, deciding how to act morally or virtuously in a certain situation is secondary to perceiving, reading the morally salient fea-tures of, or, as we shall say, “morally framing” the situation. In this sense, we do not see what is uninterpreted or “given” in the situation. What and how an agent sees, particularly, what and how an agent perceives as mor-ally significant, is vitally informed by how she characterizes the situation. As Nancy Sherman remarks, according to Aristotle, “Perception is informed by the virtues” since the agent is “responsible for how the situation appears

Architecture, Ethical Perception, and Educating for Moral Responsibility 3

as well as for omissions and distortions.”9 Recall, again, Dixon’s example: you see the long line of people waiting to be admitted to the shelter for the night. Focusing on their ragged clothing or their unkempt appearance, you might take them to be drug addicts, criminals or simply “losers of society” who are out for a handout. You may, thus, lose sight of the fact that there are needy children and their mothers in the line deserving of refuge from the freezing night. Dixon comments that the different ways of morally framing or reading a situation do not interfere with Aristotle’s primary point: there are some ways of perceiving, reading, or construing the situation that are more appropriate ethically than others.10

Aristotle also claims that we can develop our expertise in our moral read-ing of a situation—in ethical perception. Becoming attuned or sensitive to perceiving in this way is partly up to us—it is something within our control. To elaborate, growing to be adept in ethical perception can be understood more or less in the same way as acquiring and developing the moral vir-tues. Like turning out to be virtuous, ethical perception is “a skill acquired through practice, habituation, and by reflection and attention to the agent’s many direct experiences.”11 In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle proposes that just as we are responsible for developing excellence of moral character,12 so we are responsible for how things appear to us:

Someone might say that everyone aims at the apparent good, but does not control its appearance; but the end appears to each person in a way that corresponds to his character. For if each person is somehow responsible for his own state of character, he will also be himself some-how responsible for its [that is, the end’s] appearance [phantasias].13

Bringing these Aristotelian elements together, what we perceive—how we morally frame the situation—is partly up to us. This, in turn, supports the Aristotelian contention that the choices or options in a situation that ap-pear morally significant to us are partly up to us. We can only choose among what we see. We cannot, for instance, decide whether to help someone un-less we notice she is in need, and we perceive that, because she is in need, she ought to be helped. In this way, in practical reasoning, how we perceive the situation has priority over what we decide or what choices we make. For what we decide depends crucially on what choices appear salient to us, and what choices appear salient to us depends on how we morally frame the situation. Furthermore, the capacity of ethical perception is not the kind of capacity that occurs automatically or naturally; rather, it must be acquired. And like becoming virtuous, becoming adept at ethical perception is something that is acquired through practice (some educational), habituation, and reflection on our direct experiences. Since our capacity of ethical perception—how we morally frame a situation—is acquired through such means or processes, it


is partly in our control. In virtue of being partly up to us, just as each per-son is in some measure morally (and not merely causally) responsible for acquiring the virtues (or vices), so each person is partly morally responsible for becoming adept at perceiving the situation in an ethically appropriate way. The responsibility, here, will be indirect. You are indirectly responsible for something if you are responsible for it by way of being responsible for something else. You are directly responsible for something if you are re-sponsible for it but not indirectly so. So, for instance, if you are responsible (to a certain degree) for becoming generous, you are indirectly so: you are (directly) responsible for, say, past decisions as a result of the execution of which you become, over time, generous. Similarly, if you are responsible for becoming attuned to perceiving salient moral properties of a situation or of persons in the situation, you will be indirectly so. Finally, what we will be morally responsible for—the very decisions or choices, for instance, which we make—depends on ethical perception, on the plausible Aristotelian pic-ture that what choices or decisions we make in a situation is largely contin-gent upon what appears salient to us in that situation. Acquiring and developing the capacity for ethical perception, like acquir-ing the virtues, are to a considerable extent social processes or, more specifi-cally, educational ones. As Sherman emphasizes, according to Aristotle, the training and habituation pronouncedly takes place in the family:

The stable attachment between parents and child facilitates the parents’ role as [moral] educator in several ways. The pre-eminence of parents in the child’s life makes them ready-to-hand models for emulation, as well as attentive judges of the child’s specific needs and requirements. The child’s acknowledgement of the parents’ love and trust engenders a willingness to learn from them and a readiness to comply.14

Aristotle proposes that proper moral training is not so much a public is-sue or a matter for experts as it is a family concern. Like acquiring virtues, moral perception requires “favourable circumstances for acquisition—a good family, good birth, reasonable opportunities, and means for emotion and action.”15

These Aristotelian elements strongly suggest that ethical perception is not all or nothing; some people are more adept at ethical perception than others, because ethical perception can be thought of as analogous to a skill or capacity that has to be cultivated or acquired. Some people are more adept at this skill than others or better morally trained than others or simply more fortunate. This, in turn, calls to mind the following way of thinking about ethical perception. Ethical perception is perception in which the agent per-ceives her situation in the way or ways in which a person who is properly trained to become a morally sensitive agent would perceive or be disposed to perceive her situation. An ideally morally sensitive person, would, for


instance, perceive the hoodlum’s igniting the cat as wrong; be sensitive to the fact that some of those in line for the shelter are, through no fault of their own, genuinely needy persons; perceive that the child who is in need and requires reassurance is in need or requires assurance and, moreover, that the child morally ought to be helped; empathize with a mother who has just learned of the death of her first born; fail to have perceptions that involve distorted self-perception, and so on. Agents like us who are less than ide-ally morally sensitive agents would, in pertinent circumstances, have some but not all of the ethical perceptions that an ideally morally sensitive agent would have in those sorts of circumstance. In this way, as Aristotle believed, ethical perceptions are partially consti-tutive of our moral nature. Their being so partly explains why what we per-ceive is perceived as “interpreted.” If we have been fortunate to be exposed to the right moral education and training and we are mentally healthy, much of what we perceive will be perceived through moral lenses. The morally salient features of our circumstances or morally salient options will “present themselves” to us in our perceptions. Our ethical perception being part of our moral nature also explains why we cannot under most (if not all) cir-cumstances perceive “at will”; we cannot thwart our natures. Finally, on the Aristotelian account, agent-environment influence is mu-tual: the agent contributes much from the “inside”—her understanding of moral concepts, for example—to framing or interpreting her situation. But on Aristotle’s view, the agent’s relevant environment will also have a great deal to do in shaping the very cognitive or perceptual machinery that the agent brings to bear in interpreting her environment. In the ensuing discussion, what is particularly significant for our pur-poses is that others or other factors besides the agent can vitally influence how or whether the agent becomes adept at ethical perception or how the agent perceives (ethically) his situation. Again, comparison with the moral virtues will be helpful. Regarding acquisition of these virtues, if a child is not properly trained or habituated, the child will not be appropriately sen-sitive to considerations of, for instance, generosity and, consequently, may not come to acquire the virtue of being generous. Similarly, if a child is not exposed to apposite ways of ethically reading a situation, she may simply regard the distraught woman waiting to be admitted into a housing shelter as a “failure of society” rather than as a desperate mother.

2. Architecture’s Influence on Ethical Perception

We may broaden the definition of “architecture” from one that looks only at individual structures—buildings, bridges, or memorials, for example—to one that encompasses entire neighborhoods, including informal settlements, village communities, and open public spaces.16 As we understand this broad


definition, the extension of “architecture” includes urban design, landscape design, and even design (as we will explain) more generally. Our central aim is to show that among the cluster of factors that have a salient bearing on ethical perception is architecture in the broad sense. Given the associa-tion we have exposed between ethical perception and responsibility for our conduct, architecture, thus, influences what we are morally responsible for. Our central claim—architecture’s salient bearing on ethical perception—is to a considerable extent an empirical, causal one. We note two important points about this claim. First, we are well aware that, within architecture and urban planning, there has been a long-running debate about the extent to which the form of the physical environment does or can affect human behavior. Many architects, urban planners, and urban designers—perhaps because of their background, their discipline, or both—are prone to presume that the design of the physical environment can have a strong, determinant effect on human behavior.17 But many sociologists and social psychologists are critical of such claims, arguing instead that the main determinants of human behavior are social and cultural. We confess to being drawn to the position of the former. In this section, appealing to recent empirical studies in architectural and environmental psychology, we adduce support for our claim that architecture influences ethical perception and behavior. We be-lieve there is sufficient empirical evidence to sustain the plausibility of our central claim, thus, making it worthy of further investigation. Second, we propose only that architecture (in the broad sense) is among the cluster of causal factors that influence ethical perception. Architecture is one contributing factor, in addition to biological constitution, educational training, and social context. Yet, our claim is that architecture is a significant and relatively neglected causal factor. Its impact is not one of strict determi-nation but of augmented probability. Architecture’s contribution to ethical perception that the phrases “having a salient bearing on” and “influence on” capture can be understood counterfactually as follows. The capacity for morally framing or reading a situation would be less developed were ar-chitecture’s impact absent. Or, more or less equivalently, moral perception would be less attentive or visionary if architecture were not among such per-ception’s pertinent cluster of causal factors. So, although architecture does not necessitate, it certainly inclines to (or disposes one to) moral perception. It is clear that architecture develops human habitat. It is also clear that it can develop an enhanced and sustainable physical environment as well as an enhanced and sustainable social environment. The significance of a liveable physical environment on ethical perception is elementary and non-controversial: briefly, successful moral development presupposes having a habitat that supplies people with, minimally, the basic necessities of life. We restrict discussion, instead, on architecture’s impact on ethical perception via its impact on the social environment. We pay particular attention to the


possibility of architecture’s “embodying,” “codifying,” or “manifesting” (as we shall say) values.

2.1 Preliminary ObservationsStarting with some preliminaries, architecture can create habitable spaces, including spaces that facilitate quiet retreat and reflection or that encourage social interaction and dialogue, in which people feel free and safe to interact with one another. Spaces conducive to these activities can foster ethical per-ception that, we remind ourselves, is a skill acquired through (educational) practice, habituation, and reflection and attention to one’s many direct ex-periences. Free and safe environments that are friendly to interaction and that nourish a plurality of views, including a plurality of lifestyles, such as the Houses of Parliament, facilitate the sort of practice and habituation that are required for the development of ethical perception. Spaces particularly suited for quiet contemplation, such as, possibly, a Japanese garden, provide a venue for reflection on one’s direct experiences. Our moods and emotions color the lenses—including “moral lenses”—through which we see the world. Our surrounding environments, and by extension also architecture, can have a nonnegligible influence on mood and emotion and, given the possibility of the emotional coloring of the moral lenses, also on moral perception. This is true not only with individual struc-tures but with, for instance, entire layouts of a community or with land-scapes. Rural housing, for example, can be designed in a fashion that simply accentuates the poverty of the community or, alternatively, that gives the community hope for a better future. Sensitivity to local needs, such as an understanding of the terrain and an appreciation of indigenous materials that have been well tried over the passage of time, may aid designers to construct individual housing, schools, or a working environment that has a direct impact on personal well-being. Natural materials, frequently used in vernacular architecture or building, can have wholesome physiological and psychological effects.18 This, in turn, can positively elevate one’s mood and, in doing so, inspire one to work toward a better life not only for oneself but for others in the community. Witness, for example, Louis Kahn’s research building, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, which elevates the creative spirit of scientists by embracing the landscape, contrasting architectural volumes and empty spaces, and featuring pools, a narrow canal, and breath-taking sea views. Studies in environmental psychology support the empirical claim that our surrounding environments positively influence our moods and emo-tions. Of particular relevance here is that there is mounting evidence that certain types of environment—for example, parks and gardens—have a so-called restorative potential for human individuals. In particular, when individuals feel emotionally and cognitively depleted, contact with restor-


ative environments can have a beneficial influence on their mood and can also revitalize cognitive functioning.19 Since such so-called fascinating en-vironments can be attended to fairly effortlessly, they exert little pressure on cognitive resources, allowing depleted cognitive capacities to recuper-ate. To date, research has mainly demonstrated the superior restorative po-tential of natural environments over urban ones. A possible explanation for this divergent restorative potential is that the urban environments to which respondents are exposed are often banal. Indeed, when “fascinating” and carefully built architectural environments or structures, such as museums and monasteries, are considered in restorative-environments research, it turns out that they, too, can have significant restorative effects.20 In practice, the findings from restorative-environments research are mainly applied in the “evidence-based design” of healthcare settings.21

The relentless tendency to urbanization has created entire slum or shanty towns in many parts of the world. The dampening effect of slum environ-ments on mood and hope is something with which we can readily iden-tify. Consider, for instance, the Bijlmermeer social housing in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, a complex consisting of several, nearly identical high-rise buildings designed specifically to house thousands of people. Its monotonic construction and out-of-town location are invitations for depression and ghettoization. In such large-scale public-housing milieus, crime, violence, and aggression are of daily concern to the population. Research shows, how-ever, that certain design or planning interventions that make such environ-ments livelier can have a mitigating effect on aggression and crime rates. Kuo and Sullivan, for instance, determined the extent of aggression and violence for 145 inner-city public-housing constructions (the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago) and reported that residents surrounded by higher de-grees of “nature”—that is, more greenery—are less aggressive and violent than those living in more or less “barren” landscapes.22 Lack of opportunity for experiencing the restorative potential of contact with nature is also found to correlate with an increased use of antidepressants, which is consistent with the view that built environments that are stark incite depression.23

Even these preliminary forays into architecture’s influence on the social environment disclose the almost inextricable association between archi-tecture, value, and moral perception. We use “value” broadly to include, among other things, moral ideals, normative standards, judgments of vari-ous sorts of moral appraisal (such as those of right and wrong, blamewor-thiness and praiseworthiness, and goodness and badness) and the virtues. Furthermore, we use “design” in an extended sense to cover not only the ar-chitectural sense of “design” but also to what may be labelled the “lifestyle” sense—a sense that pertains, for example, to dress, in-house decoration, food, drink, and ritual. Design, in this wide sense, is involved, for instance, in the management of both public and private spaces and the enactment


of lifestyles. Managing the former raises questions such as whether spaces ought (morally) to be created that promote or encourage dialogue among people from all walks of life, while managing the latter requires addressing issues such as whether the design of a community should be open to accom-modating many different lifestyles. Our discussion of architecture and value divides into two primary seg-ments: First, how does architecture embody values, or, alternatively, what are the modes of value embodiment? Second, how do these values influence ethical perception? With the latter, we address, initially, architecture’s influ-ence on the ethical perception of people in general and, second, and perhaps more importantly, its influence on the ethical perception of children.

2.2 Architecture and the Embodiment of ValuesThe view that architecture can embody or manifest values is widely accept-ed.24 An architectural genre, or, more generally, a style of design, may em-body or exude a spirit of free, open cooperativeness or dictatorial command. Contrast, for example, Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace at the 1851 World’s Fair in London with Albert Speer’s German Pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. The former emanates constructiveness and transparency, whereas the latter sterile pageantry and subordinating pomposity. Reflection on an experi-ment by Maass and colleagues, indicating that different architectural styles have a differential “punishing” character, is revealing.25 The experimenters asked subjects to imagine attending a trial of a wrongly accused friend and to estimate the likelihood of conviction based on jurors viewing the court-house. Surprisingly, the subjects deemed the likelihood of conviction higher when asked to envision the trial occurring in a modern, high-style courthouse than in a medieval one. The former sort of courthouse was also characterized as more intimidating than the latter, despite the fact that aesthetically both courthouses were equally appreciated. Nasar and Kang document that some houses are perceived as more friendly than others, serving to confirm the as-sociation of certain values with building styles (and, possibly, materials).26 In addition, Devlin shows that people judge that they will receive variable degrees of care from medical facilities on the basis of their perception of the differing facades of the buildings that constitute these facilities.27

An architectural style can incorporate a vision of subduing or conquering nature, or it can celebrate the constructed world as being properly an exten-sion of nature. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water, for example, harmonizes with its natural rocky and wooded site. Philip Johnson’s Glass House seam-lessly unites with its natural environment. If an instance or genre of architec-ture serves to preserve or make salient certain values—and there is nothing to preclude these values from being germane to ethical perception (as we explain below)—the past can be preserved or protected by emulating it. In the “forward-looking” direction, in contrast, we can think of architecture as


a means of encoding such things as ideals or what is worthy of being emu-lated or pursued. How, precisely, however, does architecture embody values? First, there is the literal inscription of values. Many of the distinctive Islamic archi-tectural marks in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and Spain, for example, are adorned with Qur’anic script, much of which champions various values. Second, the pictorial “stories” as portrayed, for instance, in the stained-glass panels of various churches, are moral fables. Third, the story or event that motivated erection of some structure, itself made plain by the structure or, for instance, recorded in a placard by the structure, reminds us of pertinent values. Here, symbolism is frequently of fundamental importance: the symbolic aspects of the built environment can draw attention to, for example, concern about civilized values and social security. The Taj Mahal, a spectacular architec-tural legacy of the Mughals, is one of the most admired buildings of all time. It is a powerful expression of love, beauty, and perhaps grief. Sometimes, as Nelson Goodman proposes, the symbolism can be indirect. For instance, “if a church represents sailboats, and sailboats exemplify freedom from earth, and freedom from earth in turn exemplifies spirituality, then the church re-fers to spirituality via a three-link chain.”28

Fourth, the construction itself or the material used can codify values. The black granite face of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial with its 58,132 in-scribed names, for example, is a commemorative structure that calls to mind a multiplicity of values, including bravery, sacrificing for a good cause (as some may see it), or the need to hold our political leaders accountable for de-cisions that may jeopardize the lives of thousands. As remarked previously, because they trigger distinct physiological and psychological processes, ma-terials can create a sense of warmth and convey the value of affiliation. Also, from their judgment of the use of particular materials in the construction of buildings, people tend to project values onto the inhabitants of those build-ings. Dwellers of buildings constructed from concrete blocks, for example, are perceived as “colder” in their interpersonal style than, for example, those of houses constructed from weathered wood.29

Soft, rounded edges (characteristic of, for example, Antoni Gaudí’s struc-tures), as opposed to sharply angular ones, can convey the value of gentle-ness. Experiments confirm that curved objects are preferred to their sharp-angled counterparts.30 Soft, rounded shapes are also conducive to feelings of affiliation. Sharp angles, in contrast, are associated with more “antagonistic” feelings.31 Recent brain research, consistent with these findings, attests that sharp-angled shapes activate regions in the brain (the amygdala) respon-sible for responses such as fear and anxiety.32 All these empirical results co-here with the intuition of some architects that the “broken” forms of certain modern architectural styles (for example, deconstructivism) are inherently stressful and generate fear.33


Finally, the very layout of a city, town, or community can signal values of different sorts. Consider the finding that “open” versus “closed” envi-ronmental configurations are associated with, respectively, feelings of safety and feelings of threat.34 A highly symmetric grid structure can exude a sense of uniformity or order or both; a wall that is deliberately erected on the bor-ders between two nations (for instance, the wall formerly between East and West Berlin) projects a powerful image of irreconcilable difference. We do not, of course, take this list to be exhaustive. There are, presumably, multiple ways in which architecture can embody values.

2.3. Modes of Embodying Value and Ethical PerceptionHow do these different modes of embodying value affect or influence ethical perception? The impact of the built environment on us is immediate, how-ever attuned we may be to this impact, and for the most part permanent; we cannot reasonably expect the Chase Manhattan Bank to disappear if it is along our route to work or to find Istanbul shorn of the Blue Mosque. This permanence habituates us to—or even confronts us with—the values encoded in relevant structures, or at least, we are reminded (perhaps some-times to our discomfort) of these values. An ethically sensitive person will be disposed to be affected by these values; she will “tune in” to these values. Here, the effect of value embodiment in architecture on ethical perception is importantly one of “triggering” relevant perception: if there is to be ethical perception, there must be values of the appropriate sort to be perceived in the first place. Empirical research credibly indicates that the built environment impli-cates values and norms that affect us. A tidy streetscape, for example, can express a sense of order and care, whereas streets with withering trees and worn-down buildings can convey indifference and carelessness. Experi-ments show that our perception of such implicated values influences our behavior. For instance, people are more prone to steal in environments with clear perceptual indications of norm violation (for example, graffiti on the walls) than in environments where such perceived violations are absent.35 Hence, tarnished environments trigger “morally degraded” perception and trespassing behavior. But the influence of value embodiment on ethical perception also works in a more “constitutive” way (bear in mind, on the Aristotelian view, agent-environment influence is mutual): value embodiment in structures in the external world can, it would appear, enhance our very capacity of ethical perception by, for instance, presenting us with reasons for action that we would not otherwise have had in the absence of being confronted with these values or by simply sensitizing us to these values. Open meeting places such as, for example, the Rynek market square, in Krakow, Poland, encourage dialogue among an often heterogeneous community, and this may make us


more receptive to appreciating a plurality of values and to discerning mor-al options to which we where hitherto blind. Similarly, various structures, landscaped parks and gardens, and monuments or memorials present us with delightful, or sometimes sober, and engaging opportunity to reflect on values. Habituation to and reflection on values can and does color our moral sensibility and perceptual capacity. Certain urban and natural environments contribute to a pensive cast of mind and have the potential to facilitate reflection on values. As noted, a substantial amount of empirical research shows that highly “fascinating” environments have “restorative” potential—such environments can restore optimal cognitive functioning—to cognitively depleted individuals. Impor-tantly, restorative experiences are differentiated from each other in depth or “richness.” Four stages of restoration can be distinguished, each representing progressively deepening levels of restorativeness. “Clearing the head” is the first stage, in which random thoughts wander through the mind and fade away gradually. In the second stage, one recharges one’s capacity to direct one’s attention. In the third, the results of what happens in the former two—reduction of “internal noise” and initiation of “cognitive quietness”—enable one clearly to hear unbidden thoughts or calmly to consider matters on one’s mind, mental phenomena to which one had not previously attended. Final-ly, the fourth, deepest stage involves reflection: “reflections on one’s life, on one’s priorities and possibilities, on one’s actions and one’s goals.”36

We have registered that design is also central to carving out or giving expression to lifestyles. Design, again, can encourage a plurality of lifestyles, each with elements of value that are distinctive. Living a particular lifestyle, to a large extent, whether consciously or unconsciously, molds one’s “ethical identity” and, to some extent, one’s “cultural identity” too. Both these sorts of identity are tightly enmeshed with values. Thus, in shaping one’s ethical and to some degree one’s cultural identity, one’s lifestyle frequently circum-scribes the values that inform what one perceives as ethically significant, and this, in turn, has a bearing on one’s conduct. Similarly, just as design can foster lifestyles, architecture more generally can project an image of how we should live and think; it can project or embody a worldview or a way of life. Embedded in this worldview or way of life are, of course, various values. Just as value can be embodied or codified in architecture, it can be em-bodied or codified in other artistic media such as literature. The influence of value embodiment in architecture on ethical perception, however, is pro-nounced, and it is so for various reasons. Value embodiment in architecture is an instance of what may be described as the phenomenon of “values writ large,” owing to architectural works being spatially and temporally com-manding. They usually are large. One cannot but be struck, for instance, by the beauty of the Taj Mahal, Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia church, or the Alham-bra and, in being so struck, frequently be moved to reflect on the attendant


values. In addition, normally an architectural work is firmly anchored in a physical and cultural environment that alters slowly. We inhabit our built environment, and if the values in the built structures, parks, landscapes, and so forth are manifest, their influence on ethical perception is persistent. Fi-nally, design, as we have registered, can mold lifestyles and, in so doing, can be said to capture the values embedded in those lifestyles or of a cultural tradition or way of life that finds expression in those lifestyles. Again, it is not as if we can readily escape our lifestyles.

3. Moral Responsibility, the Development of Ethical Perception, and Architecture

So far, we have addressed how the values embodied in architecture can have a general influence on ethical perception. But fostering development of ethical perception—facilitating our developing into ethically perceptive agents—just as fostering our development into virtuous agents, assumes particular urgency during the formative years of childhood, if only because, as we enter adulthood, our ways of ethical conceptualization have been largely sculpted. How do, then, values embedded in architecture influence ethical perception in childhood? And how does the development of such per-ception in childhood influence those things for which children are or will be morally responsible? A slight digression into one of the conditions of moral responsibility will prove fruitful in addressing these questions.

3.1 An Agency Requirement of ResponsibilityIn addition to freedom and epistemic constraints, moral responsibility has agency requirements.37 Indeed, being an agent of a certain sort is a prereq-uisite for being able to satisfy the freedom and epistemic requirements of responsibility. Toddlers or Irish wolfhounds, for example, are not morally re-sponsible for their behavior because, among other reasons, they fail to fulfill responsibility’s agency presuppositions. To be morally responsible, then, one must be an agent of a certain sort, what we call a “morally normative agent.” One agency requirement for responsibility is that the candidate be capable of intentional deliberative action. Such action, in turn, requires some psycholog-ical basis for evaluative reasoning. To be responsible, for example, one must, at least on occasion, be able to assess which line of conduct is best from one’s own perspective of what is best. Imagine a scenario in which you are both tempted to smoke and tempted to refrain. We may suppose that you deliber-ate about or weigh these options. On the basis of such deliberation, you form a practical judgment concerning what to do that is, again, better from your own evaluative standpoint. All things considered, assume you judge that it is better for you to refrain. Suppose, further, not succumbing to weakness of will, you form a decision in keeping with this better judgment—you decide


not to smoke. You then execute this decision and refrain from smoking. In a scenario involving children, remembering his past encounter with his father in a similar situation, little Tony might reflect on whether it would be better for him to snatch the toy from his sister or to ask for it. With this picture in mind, we may say that an agent’s deliberations that issue in a practical judg-ment about what to do, which, in turn, gives rise to a decision or intention, involve an appraisal of reasons for or against action. To entertain such reasons and to appraise them, the agent requires, as we will say, an evaluative scheme (or its constituents). An evaluative scheme is made up of four constituents: (1) normative standards the agent believes (though not necessarily consciously) ought to be invoked in assessing rea-sons for action; also included are beliefs about how the agent should go about making choices. We leave it open what these standards might turn out to be, or how much weight one gives to standards that, on occasion, deliver conflicting verdicts. You might, for instance, place a lot of stock in engag ing in activities, such as smoking cigars, sanctioned by standards that derive from your peer group—it is fashionable, in your social milieu, to puff on expensive cigars. But you might also assess courses of action on the basis of prudential considerations or long-term self-interest. If you are not prone to weakness of will or other irrational influences on a particular occasion on which you are pondering whether you should indulge in a Havana, you would have to sort out (if you have not already done so) to which of the per-tinent deliberative principles you assign greater weight: the one concerning self-interest or the one regarding peer acceptance. What should be emphasized is that, to be a fitting candidate for moral responsibility, the normative (or deliberative) standards of an agent’s eval-uative scheme must include a set of moral principles or norms; the agent must be minimally morally competent. She must understand the concepts of rightness, obligatoriness, or wrongness; and she must be able to appraise, morally, various choices or actions in light of the moral norms that are ele-ments of her evaluative scheme. There is no requirement that these moral appraisals be fully considered, free of error, or even conscious. Nor is there any requirement that these norms be evidentially based or justified in any strong sense of “justification.” The agent may simply assimilate, without critical scrutiny, various norms of her religion, lifestyle, or culture. Worthy of emphasis is that one’s understanding of the normative concepts may be fairly rudimentary, and the normative assessments one makes may also be elementary. This is especially true of children. As an example, Gareth Matthews, in a philosophy class with a group of fifth-graders, read to his young students the story of the ring of Gyges in Plato’s Republic. In the story, if the setting of the ring were turned in a certain direction, whoever wore the ring would become invisible. Most of the children admitted that, if they had the ring, they would do more bad things than they do now. But one girl,


Matthews calls her “Anna,” had something special to add: “Sure, most of us would do some bad things . . . things we wouldn’t have done otherwise; but then with a magic ring like that some of us would also do some good things we might not otherwise do. . . . [I]t could be fun to do something nice for someone who wouldn’t be able to find out who had done the good deed.”38

(2) Included in the agent’s evaluative scheme are desires, beliefs, or plans that express the agent’s long-term ends or goals he deems worthwhile or valuable. Arnold, for example, may underscore his commitment to attempt to maximize overall happiness whenever he acts. A five-year-old may ac-quire the goal of being as generous as Santa. (3) An evaluative scheme’s constituents also include deliberative prin-ciples the agent utilizes to arrive at practical judgments about what to do or how to act. So, for instance, the agent may endorse a principle of this sort: when self-interest conflicts with what peer pressure demands, always side with self-interest. Or Arnold may believe that the best way to maximize overall happiness is to rely on rules of thumb such as “keep your promises,” “don’t cheat,” “don’t steal,” and such. Or a young child may endorse the principle that, when there are six crayons to be shared among three kids, each gets to keep two of the colors that he or she most likes. (4) Lastly, an evaluative scheme incorporates motivation both to act on the normative standards specified in (1) and to pursue one’s goals of the sort described in (2), at least partly on the basis of engaging the deliberative principles outlined in (3). One may opt to refine these four constituents of an evaluative scheme. One might, for instance, wonder whether satisfaction of any of these condi-tions entails that the agent is self-conscious. Here, we remain (uneasily) con-tent with what we have written about (1), (2), (3), and (4), fully recognizing that much more needs to be said to appreciate the complex notion of being a normative agent. It suffices for an individual’s being a morally normative agent at a certain time that the individual have at that time (a) an evaluative scheme with the requisite moral elements—the agent is minimally morally competent; (b) de-liberative skills and capacities—the agent has, for example, the capacity to apply the normative standards that are elements of his evaluative scheme to assessing reasons; and (c) executive capacities—the agent is able to act on at least some of his intentions, decisions, or choices, or, if you want, the agent has the capacity to translate some of his intentions, decisions, or choices into action. An individual, like a toddler, who fails to have deliberative or ex-ecutive capacities, will be able to exert much less control, if any, over her actions than an individual, like a six-year-old or an adult, who does have such capacities. Read condition (b) to require the agent to be able to engage in genuine deliberation, however rudimentary the deliberation. His delib-erative activities must meet the threshold of rationality below which such


activities fail to count as bona fide deliberation. Persons suffering from certain severe psychological ailments may not be capable of genuine deliberation. As a child matures, the child acquires an evaluative scheme; the child becomes a normative agent. Normative agency is a matter of degree. Prima-ry-school children are normative agents but not as far developed, as such agents, as mentally healthy adults. Finally, we may say that the child’s initial evaluative scheme is the evaluative scheme that the child initially acquires. Over time, initial schemes evolve; their constituents change. An individual’s evolved scheme is a scheme that causally results from appropriate modifica-tions to that individual’s initial scheme. It is adequate for our purposes to limit attention to the child’s initial scheme.

3.2 Shaping Initial Evaluative Schemes, Ethical Perception, and ArchitectureWe may now revert to the issues of central concern: How do values embed-ded in architecture influence ethical perception in children, and how, in turn, does the development of such perception in children influence for what chil-dren are or will be morally responsible? We propose that architecture can have an impact on the contours or the shaping of various constituents—the normative standards, long-term ends or goals, and moral motivation—of a child’s initial evaluative scheme. Here is the general, overall structure of our argument:

(1) Moral perception influences the development of initial evaluative schemes.

(2) Initial evaluative schemes influence the agency requirement of moral responsibility.

(3) If (1) and (2), moral perception influences moral responsibility. There-fore,

(4) moral perception influences moral responsibility.(5) The values embodied in architecture influence moral perception.(6) If (4) and (5), the values embodied in architecture influence moral

responsibility. Therefore,(7) the values embodied in architecture influence moral responsibility.

Our Aristotelian account of moral perception and our analysis of the agency requirement of moral responsibility sustain the intermediary conclusion (4) that moral perception influences moral responsibility. We have yet to sup-port (7): architecture, as a result of its impact on moral perception, via moral perception’s influence on initial evaluative schemes, bears significantly on moral responsibility. Two prefatory remarks are in order. First, in section 2, we addressed moral perception in adults. In contrast, below we draw conclusions regard-ing moral perception in children. One could object that educators crucially influence moral perception in children and, hence, that social factors that bear on moral perception in such agents become far more prominent than


architectural ones. However, a recent approach concerning the emergence of affective and cognitive capacities in the moral development of children un-derscores the importance of innate factors. On this view, human beings have an innate moral endowment. Recent research demonstrates, for example, that very young children, within the first year of life, manifest a range of protoethical behaviors, such as helping, comforting, and sharing, that derive from innate empathy of the contagion variety.39 So, although the educational factor plays an important role in moral perception in children, it does not preempt the role of the more direct (causal) interaction among architecture, biological constitution, and moral perception. Furthermore, the unfolding of normative agency, as emphasized, is pro-gressive: there are degrees of normative agency. The rudimentary elements or capacities of normative agency in the very young child are gradually supplemented in the relatively more mature child with a richer repertoire of the pertinent psychological elements or aptitudes. It would be injudicious to neglect what is presumably, largely, an unconscious effect of external factors, such as architectural ones, on various elements of the child’s evolving initial evaluative scheme. An overall sense of safety or congeniality, fostered partly by environmental factors (as we discussed in a prior section) may well have a salutary effect on the child’s sense of well-being. This, in turn, may lead the child to perceive situations differently from the way in which she would were the environment to generate an overall sense of unease. Second, regarding premise (1), we assume that there is a plausible empiri-cal account of the psychological mechanism that connects moral perception and the formation (and development) of initial evaluative schemes. Further elaboration and defense of this conjecture lies far beyond this paper’s purview. In our support of conclusion (7), we concentrate on the three main con-stituents of an (initial) evaluative scheme: the normative standards, long-term ends or goals, and moral motivation. To begin with, architecture can influence what normative standards become incorporated into the child’s evaluative scheme. The acquisition of moral concepts is a precursor to ac-quiring a set of moral norms. Matthews advances the following description of moral development that he contrasts with the cognitive and developmen-tal stage theories of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg.

A young child is able to latch onto the moral kind, bravery or ly-ing, by grasping central paradigms of that kind, paradigms that even the most mature and sophisticated moral agents still count as para-digmatic. Moral development is then something much more compli-cated than simple concept displacement. It is enlarging the stock of paradigms for each moral kind; developing better and better defini-tions of whatever it is these paradigms exemplify; appreciating better the relation between straightforward instances of the kind and close relatives; and learning to adjudicate competing claims from different


moral kinds (classically the sometimes competing claims of justice and compassion, but many other conflicts are possible).40

Architecture, with the help of child educators, can help in “enlarging the stock of paradigms” for moral kinds through, for instance, acquaintance with exam-ples of architecture that codify the relevant moral kinds. A wall that divides and accentuates difference can supply a paradigm of unfairness. Such a divid-ing wall that brings into sharp focus what many will take as irreconcilable differences between cultures or groups may foster development in the child of the disposition to preserve these differences rather than the disposition to see how similar, in the end, people are or the disposition to live harmoniously with one’s neighbors. In contrast, public spaces created to encourage children from all walks of life, regardless of ethnic or economic denomination, to enjoy various activities can present powerful examples of equality or justice. Build-ings or museums with free, easy access to all, adorned with tapestries or mu-rals that pictorially depict contrasts, for example, between the fortunate and the destitute can, again, when appropriately discussed with children, supply paradigms of fairness, generosity, or kindness. The creation of safe spaces, and spaces that both encourage candid exchange of ideas and the free mingling of people from all walks of life, can serve as a paradigm of trust. Stories, accompanied with pictures or images, have a powerful impact on children. The moral fables pictorially represented in the stained-glass panels of a church, for instance, can have a nonnegligible effect on the normative standards with which the child comes to identify. Similarly, explaining that it was the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan’s love for his wife Mumtaz Mahal (and his grief at her death) that largely motivated him to commission the building of the Taj Mahal can impress the child with the value and enduring motivational force of love. With this background, the child may well view the Taj Mahal through new eyes, the subsequent perceptions reinforcing the value of love or care. We said that design also carves out or defines lifestyles. Lifestyles incor-porate values that become an element of one’s personal and cultural iden-tity. Living or being brought up in a particular lifestyle can have a lasting impact on the moral norms that the child acquires. Design or architecture that celebrates a plurality of lifestyles, for instance, again with appropriate education, exposes the child to a pluralistic set of norms. Next, the initial evaluative scheme of a child has as a constituent, how-ever rudimentary, her ends or goals. Again, the lifestyle or lifestyles to which the child is exposed can shape these ends, as visions of architecture proj-ects can shape how we should live and think. The simple layout of built space—whether we should all abandon the working district at the end of the business day and struggle out to the suburbs, as we do in many of the large American cities, or whether our homes are intermingled with areas of trade—can mold important ends, such as the end to live in suburbs, as this


is deemed to be better than living in the inner city, or the end to purchase a vehicle. In the right sort of environment, if a mother bikes or walks to work and extols the virtues of so doing, her child may well acquire similar long-term goals as a result of being encouraged to do so. Various built structures, as Allen Carlson comments, serve “to inform, re-mind, induce, and inspire.”41 We delight, for example, in Gaudí’s structures; they inspire us to cultivate the disposition to be creative; they can energize us to produce things of value or to be enjoyed by everyone. Carlson further comments that architectural structures can serve various kinds of nonartistic functions: “[T]hey protect, shelter, and comfort, providing places in which to live, work, and worship.”42 He remarks that, given their nature, these func-tions must typically be carried out literally rather than simply symbolically: “Even if a cathedral symbolizes the glory and the power of God, it must still be a house of, and thereby provide a place in which to, worship.”43 The liter-al execution of some of architecture’s nonartistic functions can, again, have a productive impact on goal formation in children; many practitioners of a faith adopt as life-long ends or goals some of the goals their faith advocates, such as giving shelter for the night to the homeless (see Dixon’s example with which we started). Finally, living a certain lifestyle, as well as carrying out some of archi-tecture’s nonartistic functions, can motivate one to act on the normative standards or the ends that one may acquire as a result of living a particular way of life or literally executing some of architecture’s functions. Children of the Amish adopt various normative standards and goals that are largely defining of their way of life and are motivated to act in accordance with these normative standards to achieve these goals. Similarly, to take another example, Islam is, among other things, a way of life insofar as it does not compartmentalize the ethical values characteristic of the pertinent Islamic tradition and “secular values”; to be a Muslim is, among other things, to be guided in one’s everyday conduct by the values that are partly definitive of the apt Islamic tradition. Again, Islamic architecture may facilitate a child’s being able to be brought up in an Islamic way of life and thereby influence the normative standards that the child internalizes and the bearing of these standards on moral motivation.

Conclusion

We have undertaken what we stress is a preliminary exploration of a com-plex, multifaceted issue: architecture’s influence on moral responsibility and educating for responsible agency. Needless to say, we have touched on only selective elements of this composite project. We have attempted to forge rel-evant connections among ethical perception, architecture, moral responsi-bility, and educating for such responsibility. Taking our cue from Aristotle,


we agreed that ethical perception bears saliently on what we are morally responsible for. We then proposed that architecture can have a healthy effect on ethical perception, especially on the ethical perception of children. In his fascinating essay on “how buildings mean,” Goodman claims that it matters “how and when a building means” because a work of architecture “works as such to the extent that it enters into the way we see, feel, perceive, conceive, comprehend in general.”44 If architecture has or can have a significant im-pact on ethical perception and if ethical perception has or can have a signifi-cant impact on educating for moral responsibility, it follows that architecture has or can have a significant impact on moral responsibility and educating for responsible agency.45

Notes

1. Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 4.

2. Charles Starkey, “On the Category of Moral Perception,” Social Theory and Prac-tice 32 (2006): 79.

3. Beth Dixon, Animals, Emotion, and Morality: Marking the Boundary (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008), 133.

4. Starkey, “On the Category of Moral Perception,” 80–81.5. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970),

17.6. Ibid., 17–18.7. Starkey, “On the Category of Moral Perception,” 81–82.8. Rising to this challenge, Starkey advances such an analysis.9. Nancy Sherman, The Fabric of Character (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 29.10. Dixon, Animals, Emotion, and Morality, 133–34.11. Ibid., 134.12. See, for example, Robert Audi, “Responsible Action and Virtuous Character,” in

his Moral Knowledge and Ethical Character (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 157–73, for an informative exploration of the Aristotelian idea of responsi-bility for character.

13. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1966), 1114a32–1114b3.

14. Sherman, The Fabric of Character, 152.15. Ibid., 156.16. Cf. Aga Khan IV, “Architecture as a Force for Change,” in his Where Hope Takes

Root (Vancouver, BC: Douglas & McIntyre, 2008), 74.17. See, for instance, Oscar Newman’s “defensible space” thesis in his Defensible

Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design (New York: Macmillan, 1972), for design’s (allegedly) benign influence on certain kinds of antisocial or criminal behavior.

18. See, for example, Satoshi Sakuragawa, Tomoyuki Kaneko, and Yoshifumi Mi-yazaki, “Effects of Contact with Wood on Blood Pressure and Subjective Evalu-ation,” Journal of Wood Science 54 (2008): 107–13; and Satoshi Sakuragawa, Yoshi-fumi Miyazaki, Tomoyuki Kaneko, and Teruoj Makita, “Influence of Wood Wall Panels on Physiological and Psychological Responses,” Journal of Wood Science 51 (2005): 136–40.

19. See, for instance, Rachel Kaplan and Stephen Kaplan, The Experience of Nature:


A Psychological Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Roger S. Ulrich, “Biophilia, Biophobia, and Natural Landscapes,” in The Biophilia Hypothesis, ed. Stephen R. Kellert and Edward O. Wilson (Washington, DC: Is-land Press, 1993), 73–137.

20. See, for example, Dmitri Karmanov and Ronald Hamel, “Assessing the Restora-tive Potential of Contemporary Urban Environment(s): Beyond the Nature ver-sus Urban Dichotomy,” Landscape and Urban Planning 86 (2008): 115–25; Pierre Ouellette, Rachel Kaplan, and Stephen Kaplan, “The Monastery as a Restorative Environment,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 25 (2005): 175–88; and Stephen Kaplan, Lisa V. Bardwell, and Deborah B. Slakter, “The Museum as a Restorative Environment,” Environment and Behavior 25 (1993): 725–42.

21. See, for instance, Roger S. Ulrich and Craig Zimring, The Role of the Physical Envi-ronment in the Hospital of the 21st Century: A Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity (2004), http://www.healthdesign.org/sites/default/files/Role%20Physical%20Environ %20in%20the%2021st%20Century%20Hospital_0.pdf (accessed March 18, 2013).

22. Francis E. Kuo and William C. Sullivan, “Aggression and Violence in the Inner City: Effects of Environment via Mental Fatigue,” Environment and Behavior 33 (2001): 543–71.

23. Cf. Terry Hartig, Ralph Catalano, and Michael Ong, “Cold Summer Weather, Constrained Restoration, and the Use of Antidepressants in Sweden,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 27 (2007): 107–16.

24. Apart from the purely visual aspects of architecture that are more related to aes-thetical perception and experience, there is the aspect of the architectural embod-iment of values that is obviously associated with moral perception. For general discussions of architecture’s function in promoting ethical values, see, for exam-ple, Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Architecture (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1979); and Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997).

25. Anne Maass, I. Merici, E. Villafranca, R. Fulani, et al., “Intimidating Buildings: Can Courthouse Architecture Affect Perceived Likelihood of Conviction?” Envi-ronment and Behavior 32 (2000): 674–83.

26. Jack L. Nasar and Jummo Kang, “House Style Preference and Meanings across Taste Cultures,” Landscape and Urban Planning 44 (1999): 33–42; see also Jack L. Nasar, “Symbolic Meanings of House Styles,” Environment and Behavior 21 (1989): 235–57.

27. Ann S. Devlin, “Judging a Book by Its Cover: Medical Building Facades and Judgments of Care,” Environment and Behavior 40 (2008): 307–29.

28. Nelson Goodman, “How Buildings Mean,” in Nelson Goodman and Cathe-rine Z. Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1988), 42.

29. See, for example, Edward K. Sadalla and Virgil L. Sheets, “Symbolism in Build-ing Materials: Self-presentational and Cognitive Components,” Environment and Behavior 25 (1993): 155–80.

30. Cf. Moshe Bar and Maital Neta, “Humans Prefer Curved Visual Objects,” Psycho-logical Science 17 (2006): 645–48.

31. Cf. Nacy E. Aiken, The Biological Origins of Art (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998).32. Cf. Moshe Bar and Maital Neta, “Visual Elements of Subjective Preference Mod-

ulate Amygdala Activation,” Neuropsychologia 45 (2007): 2191–2200.33. See, for instance, Nilos A. Salingaros, Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction (Solin-

gen, Germany: Umbau Verlag, 2004).34. For a review of findings about this psychological association, see Arthur E.

Stamps III, “Enclosure and Safety in Urbanscapes,” Environment and Behavior 37 (2005): 102–33.

35. See, for example, Kees Keizer, Siegwart Lindenberg, and Linda Steg, “The Spreading of Disorder,” Science 322 (2008): 1681–85.


36. Kaplan and Kaplan, The Experience of Nature, 197.37. More formally, person S is morally responsible for performing action A if and

only if, in performing A, (1) S believes that S is doing something morally oblig-atory, right, or wrong (the epistemic requirement); (2) A is under S’s control (the freedom or control requirement); and (3) S is an agent of an appropriate sort (the agency requirement). Part of the latter is the authenticity constraint: action A should causally stem from authentic motivational springs. For a detailed analy-sis of these conditions of moral responsibility, see Ishtiyaque Haji, Moral Apprais-ability (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Ishtiyaque Haji and Stefaan E. Cuypers, Moral Responsibility, Authenticity, and Education (New York: Routledge, 2008).

38. Gareth B. Matthews, “Creativity in the Philosophical Thinking of Children,” Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children 15 (2000): 17.

39. For a survey of this approach, see Susan Dwyer, “Moral Development and Moral Responsibility,” The Monist 86 (2003): 181–99.

40. Gareth B. Matthews, “Concept Formation and Moral Development,” in Philo-sophical Perspectives in Developmental Psychology, ed. James Russell (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 185.

41. Allen Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment: The Appreciation of Nature, Art, and Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2000), 208.

42. Ibid. See also Goodman “How Buildings Mean,” 32.43. Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment, 208.44. Goodman “How Buildings Mean,” 48.45. We are very grateful to the architects Hildegarde Heynen and Hans Vandeweghe

for fruitful discussions and comments.


47.3.haji

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professor of philosophy

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