The built environment.

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 efforts to make good decisions and to do the right thing. We develop a preliminary typology of stuckness for ordinary residents of urban and suburban environments, and suggest ways in which various disciplinary perspectives might be brought to bear on each type. We close by looking ahead to two possible extensions of inquiry into stuckness: a consideration of how people and groups who have some power in shaping the built environment (e.g., developers, planners) may be stuck, and a consideration of when and under what circumstances people might get unstuck. On Being Stuck: Looking for the Limits of Ethics in the Built Environment Robert Kirkman and Douglas S. Noonan Georgia Institute of Technology I. Being Stuck A naïve model of ethics in practice holds that judgment leads unproblematically to choice, which leads unproblematically to action, which leads unproblematically to result. For activists in urban and environmental policy, this model provides some grounds for optimism as well as a prescription for social change: to change the world, it is necessary only to change the way people behave; to change the way people behave, it is necessary only to change the way people think. For ethicists, this model provides the satisfaction of knowing that ethical awareness and ethical judgment play a very important role in shaping human behavior and, by extension, the human environment. The actual experience of choosing and acting is much more complex than the naïve model suggests, however, which challenges the optimism of ethicists and activists. Put simply, reasonable people with good judgment and good intentions can get stuck on the way to actually doing good for themselves and for their communities. Even if it were relatively easy to identify the problems of growth and to envision a better ways of organizing the built environment, it may nonetheless be difficult to do anything that could bring the vision closer to reality. Changing transportation and resource-use patterns is not nearly so simple as getting individuals to change their own behavior, and changing their behavior is not nearly so simple as changing the way they think. Our purpose here is to lay the conceptual groundwork for a multi-disciplinary inquiry into the lived experience of being stuck, and to indicate some directions in which this inquiry