A central ethical issue for planners today is how they can justify the use of administrative discretion in a democratic society. One major indicator of how planners think about their relationship to decisionmakers and to the public is how they define the "public interest. " The argument is made here that unless there are countervailing controls, the further planners'ideas of the public interest diverge from the ordinary moral principle of democratic responsiveness, the more difficult they will be to legitimate. This article explores four ideas of the planner's role and the ideas of the public interest associated with them. They are pluralist aggregation, an economic/analytical approach, the common interest, and the good reasons approach.

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Normative ethics provide guidelines for deciding what makes right acts right. Planners who have written explicitly about ethics have taken a wide variety of approaches-descriptive, analytical, and normative. Normative approaches in planning have been shaped by the dispute in philosophy between two major approaches to ethics. Utilitarianism focuses on the goodness of consequences in deciding what is right. Deontological approaches focus on rules, rights, and actions that are right in themselves. Because neither of these approaches is fully satisfactory by itself; others have been developed that attempt to deal with particular weaknesses. Rule-utilitarianism and intuitionism are discussed here. Either could be thought of as the approach that underlies professional codes of ethics.

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