ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to explore how engagements with meta ethical questions might offer scholars alternative bases for theorising and operating at the interface of knowledge and action in situated contexts. It also aims to demonstrate how such engagements might be of particular interest to scholars who are calling for Southern theories. In order to begin to understand why scholarships on planning ethics are rooted, almost exclusively, within normative ethical frameworks, the chapter analyses some of planning's dominant epistemologies of ethical actions. Knowledge of social and spatial processes becomes, at once, a condition for and a consequence of planning. For the scholarship on planning ethics in particular, the idea that social rules render planning actions with objective meaning thus grew in prominence, even if John Rawls' later assertions recant universal ethical positions. The chapter discusses the potential relevance of meta ethics in Southern contexts, before drawing to a conclusion.
