Book Review: Ethics in Everyday Places

As ethics in mapping and geospatial technologies is a central theme to our book and this blog, I recommend those reading these words right now to read the book Ethics in Everyday Places: Mapping Moral Stress, Distress, and Injury, co-published from MIT Press and Esri Press.

I respect an author even more when the author has the ability to step out of the details and examine issues from “afar”–but not a dispassionate “afar”; rather, as someone engaged and living the issues discussed: With the ability to pick out why the issues matter and how they impact our everyday lives. The author, Dr Tom Koch, accomplishes this brilliantly in this book.

What is perhaps most compelling about this book is how personal it is. While I have sought to include personal stories in the equity and ethics presentations I have given, such as presentations using this story map, Dr Koch moves this personal touch to a new level. Right at the beginning, the author investigates the feeling when, “you do everything right but know you’ve done something wrong.” This results in moral stress and injury, which the author then explains, followed by a discussion of scenarios, events, and resulting maps in which issues of ethics and morality are embedded. I appreciate especially the author’s tenet, “while I do discuss the insights of moral philosophers and ethicists, I build my argument from the ground up, on the experiential basis of normal folk in daily life.”

As MIT’s book review states, the book is “Written accessibly and engagingly” and it “transforms how we think of ethics—personal and professional—amid the often conflicting moral injunctions across modern society.” Even the chapters are out of the ordinary and intriguing; they include “The Tobacco Problem” and “It’s … complex” in addition to “Cultural Realities: Ethics, Values, and Morals”. As a geographer I am especially intrigued by the contents of the chapter about the ethics of scale, and the scale of distress. Maps are the glue holding these discussions together, but the author makes a strong point that mapmakers’ concerns offered insight to a much greater challenge and problem. This touches on what I and many colleagues of mine like to focus on–that maps are often not the final goal, but rather, tools to enable understanding that leads to wise decision making.

The author knows the material well: The book makes it clear that the author is a geographer who has talked with many people in cartography and geography. Drawing on the author’s rich personal experience adds to the richness and thought-provoking nature of this book. I recommend it for anyone involved in geospatial technologies, geography, education, and the social aspects of technology. I do love the author’s analogies, such as because truths are grounded in values that we hold near and dear, they may change over time, and that we might think of truths as “tectonic plates that support the world while shifting slowly beneath the surface.”

A few of the book chapters are available through Google books, here, which I hope will encourage you to read the entire book.

–Joseph Kerski