ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how one can learn about the ethics of planning practice from planners' accounts of their own work. It also explores the complex ethical challenges that confront planners and policy analysts, and examines excerpts from a profile of a young transportation planner discussing work. Ethical challenges in planning and policy analysis involve far more than "making the right decision". A better strategy of exploring the ethics of planning would examines how planners handle the inherent problems that decision makers face. The moral complexity of planners' accounts, can teach about the ethical character and ethical challenges of planning practice. The chapter recognizes that value in planning settings comes in plural forms — some quantifiable, some obviously not. It explains how practical judgment must precede, if not altogether preempt, calculation. The chapter discusses that when mandates are ambiguous, as they often are, when the significance of the facts is not immediately obvious, deliberation must precede decision making.
