This paper looks at some key moments in modern architectural history to show the degree to which architectural value systems share—or otherwise—the values of the other arts and then extend the survey to the present-day emergence of environmental ethics in architecture. It argues that the factual, non-ideological sound of environmental ethics may be promising, but it also signals the arrival of another period of drifting architectural and artistic value systems: one in which, perhaps not for the first time, the ethical is not invested in any kind of semantics and aesthetics of the product itself, but in the processes of its formation and, importantly, in the lifeenhancing possibilities of the work.