The Centrality of Normative Ethical Theory to Contemporary Planning Theory

Since planning is a normative activity one would expect public planning to be based on moral foundations. Unfortunately, post-WWII mainstream planning theory became divorced from ethical theory. Ironically, this cleavage reflected an erroneous shared premise—that each discipline was technical in nature and should eschew value questions. This fallacious premise is now largely rejected. Contemporary planning theory fully recognizes the inherently normative nature of public planning processes. However, it still makes little use of normative ethical theory to illuminate the issues raised by this recognition. In this article we will present a spectrum of five normative ethical theories and show how these theories provide the underlying normative foundation for six theories of planning. Thus many debates about planning theories can be understood as debates about underlying normative ethical theories