One reason lies in how ethical problems are usually framed. In many cases, discussions in the design field focus on visible, surface-level issues. Designers are encouraged to work on projects that look ethical, such as sustainable packaging or fair trade branding. These efforts may have positive effects, but they often leave deeper structures untouched.

Take fair trade as an example. Fair trade products promise to pay producers a higher price. This sounds just, and in some cases it does improve income. However, paying five dollars instead of one does not end the colonial relationships through which the Global North has long exploited the resources of the Global South. Children cultivating cacao in parts of Africa often work to grow food they will not eat, while being denied access to formal education. In regions of the Amazon, repeated coffee cultivation has contributed to environmental degradation. Unequal access to education, resources, and power persists. From this perspective, ethical design that supports fair trade branding can become a way of making injustice more acceptable, rather than challenging it.

Yet designers may still feel they are “doing good,” because their work aligns with what society labels as ethical. This shows a first limitation of current design ethics: it often addresses what appears good, rather than asking what is fundamentally good, or for whom. We may need to ask whether designers have become too comfortable working on fragmented, short-term projects that simply attach design to socially approved ideas of “good,” instead of critically reflecting on the deeper structural problems beneath them.

A second, and perhaps more painful, limitation emerges in the industrial context where most designers work.

Designers rarely control the goals of the systems they design. Business strategies, profit models, and growth targets are usually decided elsewhere. Designers are expected to implement these decisions, even when they conflict with their own moral judgments. When ethics clashes with business logic, ethics usually loses.

Imagine being asked to design a feature that makes it difficult for users to cancel a subscription. You recognize this as manipulative or deceptive. You know it undermines user autonomy. Yet refusing the task could put your job at risk. Many designers comply, not because they agree, but because they feel they have no real alternative.

Over time, this situation creates ambivalence. Designers may tell themselves they are “just following orders,” while still feeling responsible for the harm their work causes. Ethics becomes internalized as guilt, discomfort, or burnout. Structural problems—business models, power relations, market pressures—are experienced as personal moral failures. In reality, designers often have to carry out design decisions that conflict with their moral values, because refusing a request from a client or superior is rarely a real choice. This places designers in a contradictory state: feeling both morally irresponsible and deeply guilty at the same time.

This is the condition from which my research begins. So how might designers escape these ethical dilemmas? This is not a problem that can be solved by just blaming designers or offering simple moral guidelines to them. To move beyond ethical dilemmas, we first need to rethink what we mean by ethics itself. Rather than clinging to actions that are socially labeled as “good,” we must reflect more carefully on what is genuinely good for humans, for society, and for the planet.

Design ethics should not be treated as a responsibility placed solely on designers. Creating ethical products or services involves organizations, technologies, systems, and broader social, economic, and political structures. For this reason, understanding the relationships among these actors is essential. Any meaningful discussion of design ethics must take this web of relations into account, rather than isolating responsibility at the level of individual designers.

This post is written based on ideas drawn from the author’s previously published work: Song, Sujin, and Soojin Jun. 2025. “Rethinking Design Ethics from the Perspective of Spinoza.” Design Issues 41, no. 1 (Winter 2025). https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00793