ABSTRACT
Practices of aviation mapping have been perhaps surprisingly relevant to both forming ethical perspectives and informing ethical practices since the mid-1960s. Maps drawn from aerial data to air-age global standards have also enabled possibilities for studying issues of environmental management and sustainability, as well as poverty and development, while being less hampered by national or state boundaries or interests. The legacy of the Second World War casts dark shadows on the subject of both ethics and aviation. Human thought and experience was itself changing: evolving and adapting to worldview-challenging technologies and opportunities, as well as new ways of framing ethical questions and considerations. Robert Platt was, in 1945, offering a template for rethinking the nature of ethical agency in a new, air-age global context, informed by the greater and more humane potential of aviation technology.
