How should an impartial social observer judge distributions of well-being across different individuals when there is uncertainty regarding the state of the world? I explore this question by imposing very weak conditions of rationality and benevolent sympathy on impartial betterness judgments under uncertainty. Although weak enough to be consistent with all the main theories of rationality, these conditions prove to be sufficient to rule out any heterogeneity in what is good for individuals, to require a neutral attitude to uncertainty on (...) the part of the social observer, and to require that both individual and social betterness be strongly separable. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the question of partiality and impartiality in the application of triage. Triage is a process in medical research which recommends that patients should be sorted for treatment according to the degree or severity of their injury. In employing the triage protocol, however, the question of partiality arises because socially vulnerable groups will be neglected since there is the likelihood that the social determinants of a patient's health may diminish her chance of survival. As a (...) process that is based on the severity of a patient's injury, triage will be unfair, and hence negatively partial, to socially vulnerable people. Thus, I aim in this paper to show that the triage protocol fails as an impartial evaluative process because its only aim is to maximize survivability. I contend that: (i) triage would lead to the neglect of the social condition of patients or victims, and (ii) it will only serve the utilitarian purpose of maximization of outcomes which may not be justified in some cases. (shrink)

Bernard Williams questioned whether impartial morality “can allow for the importance of individual character and personal relations in moral experience.” Underlying his position is a distinction between factual and practical deliberation. While factual deliberation is about the world and brings in a standpoint that is impartial, practical deliberation is, he claims, radically first‐personal; it “involves an I that [is] intimately the I of my desires.” While it may be thought that Williams's claim implies an unpalatable Humean subjectivism, the present article (...) argues that this does not follow: That first‐person practical deliberation is directed both by the “I of my desires” and by the world. Drawing on Peter Winch's argument against the universalizability of moral judgments and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, the article argues that practical deliberations involve discovering value in the world, but that what is revealed about the world depends constitutively on the first‐person deliberations and decisions of particular agents. (shrink)

We present an experiment designed to investigate three different mechanisms to achieve impartiality in distributive justice. We consider a first-person procedure, inspired by the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, and two third-party procedures, an involved spectator and a detached observer. First-person veiled stakeholders and involved spectators are affected by an initially unfair distribution that, in the stakeholders’ case, is to be redressed. We find substantial differences in the redressing task. Detached observers propose significantly fairer redistributions than veiled stakeholders or involved (...) spectators. Risk preferences partly explain why veiled stakeholders propose less egalitarian redistributions. Surprisingly, involved spectators, who are informed about their position in society, tend to favour stakeholders holding the same position as they do after the initial distribution. (shrink)

Anthropologists have documented substantial cross-society variation in people’s willingness to treat strangers with impartial, universal norms versus favoring members of their local community. Researchers have proposed several adaptive accounts for these differences. One variant of the pathogen stress hypothesis predicts that people will be more likely to favor local in-group members when they are under greater infectious disease threat. The material security hypothesis instead proposes that institutions that permit people to meet their basic needs through impartial interactions with strangers reinforce (...) a tendency toward impartiality, whereas people lacking such institutions must rely on local community members to meet their basic needs. Some studies have examined these hypotheses using self-reported preferences, but not with behavioral measures. We conducted behavioral experiments in eight diverse societies that measure individuals’ willingness to favor in-group members by ignoring an impartial rule. Consistent with the material security hypothesis, members of societies enjoying better-quality government services and food security show a stronger preference for following an impartial rule over investing in their local in-group. Our data show no support for the pathogen stress hypothesis as applied to favoring in-groups and instead suggest that favoring in-group members more closely reflects a general adaptive fit with social institutions that have arisen in each society. (shrink)

우리가 자신의 행위를 도덕적으로 정당화하고자 한다면, 그 행위가 도덕적 원칙과 병립할 수 있다는 것을 보여주어야 한다. 즉 도덕적 행위의 정당화는 보편적 관점에서 받아들여질 수 있어야 한다. 근대 이후 많은 철학자들과 여러 윤리이론들은 도덕적 추론은 공평성에 대한 요구를 받아들여야 한다고 주장했다. 이것을 우리는 ‘공평성 논제 impartiality thesis’라 부를 수 있다. 공평성 논제에 따르면 우리는 어떠한 도덕적 판단을 내리고자 할 때, 우리 자신이나 혹은 우리와 특별한 관계를 가진 사람들의 욕구나 이익에 특별한 비중을 두어서는 안 되며, 공평한 관망자로서 중립적 관점에서 판단하려 노력해야 (...) 한다. 하지만 또 다른 철학자들은 도덕 판단에 있어서의 이러한 공평성 논제에 동의하지 않는다. 이들은 사적으로 특별한 인간관계에서 요구되는 의무와 편향성(partialism)을 공평성 논제는 설명할 수 없다고 주장한다. 본 논문에서 필자는 도덕 판단에서의 공평성에 대한 요구에 관해 브래드 후커(Brad Hooker)가 제시하고 있는 공평성에 대한 평가와 도덕 판단에서 그 적용 단계를 중심으로 살펴보았다. 이를 통해 필자는 결국 윤리적 판단의 정당화 근거를 위해서는 공평성에 대한 요구가 충족되어야 함을 논증하였다. 왜냐하면 도덕 규칙들에 대한 정당화 요구는 도덕 판단에 있어서의 비결정성과 불확실성을 최소화하여 도덕에 관한 공평한 권위를 부과하기 위한 도덕 체계 일반의 보편적 요구사항이기 때문이다. (shrink)

Amartya Sen has argued that contractarian theories of justice inevitably fall victim to the problem of parochialism, for the reason that they rely on a problematically narrow conception of impartiality. Sen finds a corrective model of impartiality in Adam Smith’s figure of the impartial spectator. In this essay, I argue that Sen’s invocation of the spectator to resolve the problem of parochialism is unfounded, as the impartial spectator is fundamentally a product of socialization that serves to propagate conventional (...) moral norms. I consider various interpretive avenues for “rescuing” the spectator from parochialism, and ultimately conclude that a minor amendment to Smith’s account, resting on the possibility of a conscience informed by moral pluralism, is required. (shrink)

This paper considers the question of whether impartiality and predictability are illusory to the extent that every consequentialist ethical theory must be hopeless.

Consequentialism is often charged with demandingness objections which arise in response to the theory’s commitment to impartiality. It might be thought that the only way that consequentialists can avoid such demandingness objections is by dropping their commitment to impartialism. However, I outline and defend a framework within which all reasons for action are impartially grounded, yet which can avoid demandingness objections. I defend this framework against what might appear to be a strong objection, namely the claim that anyone who (...) accepts the theory will be practically irrational. (shrink)

In modern Western philosophy, impartial reasoning has defined the moral point of view and determined the strategies of moral justification. Political philosophers have invoked it as well, to legitimate certain governmental and social institutions. Normative impartiality has become highly controversial in recent years, however, and feminists have contributed substantially to these debates.

Defenders of sophisticated evidential decision theory (EDT) have argued (1) that its failure to provide correct recommendations in problems where the agent believes himself asymmetrically fallible in executing his choices is no flaw of the theory, and (2) that causal decision theory gives incorrect recommendations in certain examples unless it is supplemented with an additional metatickle or ratifiability deliberation mechanism. In the first part of this paper, I argue that both positions are incorrect. In the second part of the paper, (...) I show how the agent's preferences involved in standard counterexamples to EDT, such as Newcomb's problem, violate the Jeffrey/Bolker preference axioms, specifically the Impartiality axiom. (shrink)

‘Impartial benevolence and partial love’ contributes, like the other essays in the edited collection ‘The Problem of Moral Demandingness’, to the discussion of that problem. Its contribution is to offer a phenomenological exploration of the place that these two ideas/ ideals actually have in our ethical life and experience. On the basis of this exploration I argue that neither ideal, neither impartial benevolence nor partial love, comprehensively “trumps” the other — both are important, and more to the point, simply different. (...) Hence there is no general algorithm for deciding which counts for more. (shrink)

Distinguishing between reasonable partiality and reasonable impartiality makes a difference in resolving the serious clashes between 'priority for compatriots' versus cosmopolitan global duties. Defenders of a priority for compatriots have to acknowledge two strong moral constraints: states have to fulfil all their special, domestic and trans-domestic duties, and associative duties are limited by distributive constraints resulting from the moral duty to fight poverty and gross global inequalities. In the recent global context, I see four main problems for liberal-nationalist defenders (...) of priority for compatriots: Reasonable particularists often forget that associative duties for compatriots compete with many sub-national and trans-domestic associative duties. They tend to forget that associative national duties compete with other, strong special obligations regarding not only citizens and residents inside nation-states but also trans-domestic obligations across state borders. They do not properly discuss the problem of unallocated duties in addressing global poverty and insecurity. The design of supra-national and global 'mediating' institutions, and the crafting of policies to remedy the misallocation of duties and to coordinate the required state activities is an urgent task neglected by liberal nationalists. In the recent context, reasonable partiality's bias towards partiality is most unwelcome and morally dubious. Reasonable impartiality's bias towards cosmopolitanism helps to stimulate a drastic shift in obligations and stimulates productive trans-national institutional design. (shrink)

Many hold that morality is essentially impartial. Many also hold that partiality is justified. Susan Wolf argues that these commitments push us towards downgrading morality's practical significance. Here I argue that there is a way of pushing morality's boundaries in a partialist direction in a way that respects Wolf's insights.

We need modal imagination in order to extend our conception of reality - and, in particular, of human beings - beyond our immediate experience in the indexical present; and we need to do this in order to preserve the significance of human interaction. To make this leap of imagination successfully is to achieve not only insight but also an impartial perspective on our own and others' inner states. This perspective is a necessary condition of experiencing compassion for others. This is (...) the primary thesis I will try to defend in this discussion. (shrink)

Following a long-standing philosophical tradition, impartiality is a distinctive and determining feature of moral judgments, especially in matters of distributive justice. This broad ethical tradition was revived in welfare economics by Vickrey, and above all, Harsanyi, under the form of the so-called Impartial Observer Theorem. The paper offers an analytical reconstruction of this argument and a step-wise philosophical critique of its premisses. It eventually provides a new formal version of the theorem based on subjective probability.

Impartiality is primarily a feature of normative or evaluative deliberation – deliberation about what ought to be done or about something's goodness or badness. An initial description is this: such deliberation is impartial when it is not unduly influenced by the deliberator's own interests, preferences, or loyalties. Derivatively, impartiality can be attributed to actions that are guided by deliberation with this feature, or persons who characteristically deliberate or act in this way.

Panopticism is Michel Foucault’s term for the internalisation of surveillance and cultural control that is closely linked to the panopticon or surveillance architecture (associated with prisons) of Jeremy Bentham during the 18th and 19th centuries. The purpose of this article is to argue that Adam Smith’s concept of the impartial spectator provides an alternative perspective of internal surveillance that may enhance moral development and resistance to oppressive forms of control. For Smith, this is established through analogical imagination that is used (...) for self-observation to enhance prudent behaviour. The impartial spectator and its resistance to totalitarian behaviour is specifically relevant in contemporary society because of the dominant role of digital technology and scandals that have exposed digital media as participating in digital forms of surveillance, digital personae, artificial intelligence and control. It will also be highlighted that digital surveillance is closely connected to the capitalism that has infiltrated all domains of society, from socio-personal relationships to the workplace. (shrink)

The philosophical debate concerning political exchange has largely been confined to debating the desirability of vote trading; where individuals can sell their votes or buy votes from others. However, I show that the vote credit systems prevalent in public choice theory entirely avoid the common objections to political exchange that afflict vote trading proposals. Namely, vote credit systems avoid equality concerns and inalienability concerns. I offer an alternative critique to formal mechanisms that encourage political exchange by drawing on the role (...) that impartiality and impartial moral judgements play in democratic and electoral institutions. (shrink)

This essay critically assesses two strategies of accommodation used by defenders of impartialism in ethics to argue that the care orientation represents no genuine challenge to impartialist theoretical paradigms. One strategy focuses on impartiality as a constraint on moral deliberation, the other as a constraint on moral justification. While highlighting respects in which the commitment to impartiality is more consonant with the care orientation than many advocates of care have acknowledged, this essay attempts to clarify crucial ways in (...) which each accommodationist strategy falls, thus locating some of the more important contributions and challenges the care orientation offers to moral theory. (shrink)

Kierkegaard's "Works of Love" provocatively presses for a reconsideration of impartiality, partiality, and equality. Past readings of this text have typically (1) criticized its focus on the abstract category of "human being," ignoring its attention to distinctiveness and difference; (2) defended it from the charge of abstraction by accenting its treatment of distinctiveness and difference, playing down its assumptions about the "essentially" human; (3) acknowledged its emphases on both essence and difference, arguing that they are incompatible and irreconcilable; or (...) (4) acknowledged both emphases, assuming they are compatible without exploring or accounting for the apparent incompatibility. As a means of resolving this seeming inconsistency, I will focus on Kierkegaard's recommendation of moral blindness and its implications for moral vision, and I will argue that "Works of Love" contains resources for an understanding of impartiality that allows moral attention to concrete difference. (shrink)

The paper constitutes a detailed critical commentary on Stephen Darwall’s Impartial Reason. Its central thesis is that Darwall’s attempt to integrate a naturalist theory of substantive reasons for acting with a neo-rationalist derivation of moral requirements from the very concept of practical rationality is faced with insurmountable theoretic problems. The author argues that anyone who would accept a plausible internalist account of reasons, that justificatory reasons for an agent to act are facts which must be capable of motivating that agent (...) under certain conditions, cannot establish on an a priori or rationalist basis claims for the intersubjective validity of reasons or substantive normative requirements of any kind, but rather must acknowledge that such claims are both irreducibly empirical and epistemically risky. (shrink)

Did the impartiality of clinical trials play any role in their acceptance as regulatory standards for the safety and efficacy of drugs? According to the standard account of early British trials in the 1930s and 1940s, their impartiality was just rhetorical: the public demanded fair tests and statistical devices such as randomization created an appearance of neutrality. In fact, the design of the experiment was difficult to understand and the British authorities took advantage of it to promote their (...) own particular interests. I claim that this account is based on a poorly defined concept of experimental fairness . I present an alternative approach in which a test would be impartial if it incorporates warrants of non-manipulability. With this concept, I reconstruct the history of British trials showing that they were indeed fair and this fairness played a role in their acceptance as regulatory yardsticks. (shrink)

According to Adam Smith, we appeal to the imagined reactions of an ‘impartial spectator’ when justifying moral judgements of others and aspire to be impartial spectators when making judgements of ourselves. However, psychological research has shown that trying to be impartial will often have the paradoxical effect of reinforcing other-directed prejudice and self-serving bias. I argue that we can get around this problem by aspiring to be ‘partially impartial spectators’ instead.

Judith Jarvis Thomson recently argued that it is impermissible for a bystander to turn a runaway trolley from five onto one. But she also argues that a trolley driver is required to do just that. We believe that her argument is flawed in three important ways. She fails to give proper weight to (a) an agent¹s claims not to be required to act in ways he does not want to, (b) impartiality in the weighing of competing patient-claims, and (c) (...) the role of patient-claims in determining agent-duties. All three of these failures can be understood in terms of what we call the Mechanics of Claims, an approach we develop for identifying and balancing competing claims in determining rights. Using that framework, one can see both why Thomson's most recent argument is mistaken, and how to think more clearly about deontological choices generally. (shrink)

This article contributes to the scholarly analysis of impartiality in the early modern period. While previous studies have focused on impartiality in law, history, philosophy and aesthetics, this article analyzes impartial and cold or even cold-blooded self-examinations and self-observations, primarily in the work of the eighteenth-century German philosophers and writers Georg Friedrich Meier and Karl Philipp Moritz. The article is particularly concerned with the relation between the therapeutic and epistemic meanings and functions of these concepts. Without suggesting a (...) linear development, it details how, over time, therapeutic connotations tended to be challenged and partly replaced by epistemic ones. It further argues that this development was intimately connected to the culture of sensibility and, in particular, to the growing interest in the unique, individual and often sensual experience. (shrink)

This article examines the ways in which French tourist officers manage impartiality in telephone calls when faced with recommendation-seeking questions. Using Conversation Analysis and drawing on a corpus of 700+ telephone calls, it shows that, by typically avoiding conforming responses, officers resist confirming the evaluative element embodied in RSQs and, thus, avoid making recommendations. Instead, they opt to treat the questions as unanswerable in their own terms, a practice that may be deployed on its own or in conjunction with (...) other practices such as supplying information that will assist callers in making their choices and/or constructing responses as contingent. Further, officers typically do not decline to make recommendations on institutional grounds and, through their choices of interactional practices, obscure the institutional restrictions under which they operate. Thus, the selection of nonconforming responses by tourist officers is shown to contribute to the maintenance of an impartial stance. Finally, the article addresses the notions of affiliation and alignment and shows that nonconforming responses are less disaffiliative than outright rejections. (shrink)

Philosophers are apt to assume that impartial thinking is both possible and desirable. This article, originating in a very definite doubt of this assumption, is an attempt at an examination of the problem.

Peremptory norms of general international law (jus cogens) are universally binding prohibitions that override any consideration for non-compliance (e.g., genocide and slavery). The question is how nonconsensual norms emerge from a consensual international legal order. It appears that either the peremptoriness of jus cogens renders consent superfluous to the norm’s binding force or consent divests jus cogens of its peremptory status. The goal of this paper is to resolve the dilemma by explaining why jus cogens is exempt from the general (...) requirement of consent that binds states to the rules of international law. The paper provides an impartiality-based account of enforcement that explains why a state’s refusal to give consent to jus cogens may be overridden in a consensual legal order. (shrink)

Showing that the Extreme Demand can be rejected from an appropriately impartial point of view would constitute a decisive objection to it. This would undermine the case for thinking that it could be a demand of either fairness or beneficence. An ‘appropriately’ impartial point of view, for the purposes of this argument, is a point of view of impartial concern for other people’s interests.

A great deal of philosophical consideration has been given in recent years to the issue of justice. In large measure this effort has focused upon justice in. relation to social institutions, to the distributive question of disbursing social benefits on the one hand or punishments and burdens on the other hand. Essentially we may view justice as having two basic requirements. In the first place we need conditions assuring impartial treatment of individuals and, in the second place, conditions for reasonable (...) treatment of individuals — as injustice may arise either if relevantly similar persons are accorded dissimilar treatment or if they receive similar but unreasonable treatment.In this article I shall examine a number of devices which have been proposed to meet the first requirement — that of impartiality. Social theorists have pursued impartiality with strategies ranging from the disinterested Ideal Observer of many utilitarians to the ‘veil of ignorance’ conditions in John Rawls's revitalized contract theory. I shall demonstrate that the preoccupation with impartiality in social institututions has had an unfortunate consequence. It has obscured the original motive for impartiality and led to a misunderstanding of the concept. (shrink)

Why should a lottery be used in the allocation of an indivisible good to which participants in the lottery have an equally strong claim? Stone argues that when indeterminacy arises, in which it is impossible to satisfy the equality condition requiring like cases to be treated alike, the impartiality principle suggests that the agent responsible for the allocation task should not intend to favor one over another on the basis of invalid reasons. In this article, I argue that the (...) impartiality principle is neither sufficient nor necessary to explain the fairness of lotteries. Instead, the fairness of lotteries is explained by the sanitizing effect that lotteries generate to screen out the reactive attitudes of resentment and indignation that claimants might otherwise have if they do not obtain the good in question. (shrink)

This paper discusses “impartiality thought experiments”, i.e., thought experiments that attempt to generate intuitions which are unaffected by personal characteristics such as age, gender or race. We focus on the most prominent impartiality thought experiment, the Veil of Ignorance (VOI), and show that both in its original Rawlsian version and in a more generic version, empirical investigations can be normatively relevant in two ways: First, on the assumption that the VOI is effective and robust, if subjects dominantly favor (...) a certain normative judgment behind the VOI this provides evidence in favor of that judgment; if, on the other hand, they do not dominantly favor a judgment this reduces our justification for it. Second, empirical investigations can also contribute to assessing the effectiveness and robustness of the VOI in the first place, thereby supporting or undermining its applications across the board. (shrink)

Confronted with Adolf Eichmann, evildoer par excellence, Hannah Arendt sought in vain for any 'depth' to the evil he had wrought. How is the philosopher to approach evil ? Is the celebrated criterion of impartiality ill-equipped to guide judgment when its object is evil - as exhibited, for instance, in the recent genocide in Bosnia? This essay questions the ability of the neutral 'third party' to respond adequately to evil from a standpoint of avowed impartiality. Discussing the different (...) roles of perpetrator and victim, I argue that in any knowledge about evil the victim is the supremely privileged source; this being so, the non-party to the occurrence of evil must privilege the testimony of the victimized - even at the cost of strict impartiality of moral judgment. Key Words: Arendt • evil • genocide • Goldhagen • impartiality • judgment • Kant • Levinas. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Ingredients of Impartiality Why Does Impartiality Matter? Challenges to Epistemic Reliability Conclusion.

It is a commonplace that in many societies people adhere to profoundly different conceptions of the good. Given this we need to know what political principles are appropriate. How can we treat people who are committed to different accounts of the good with fairness? One recent answer to this pressing question is given by Brian Barry in his important work Justice as Impartiality. This book, of course, contains much more than this. It includes a powerful and incisive discussion of (...) several accounts of distributive justice, a critique of other attempts to defend liberal neutrality and a rebuttal of those who are critical of the ideal of impartiality. In this paper I wish, however, to focus on Barry's defence of liberal neutrality. The paper falls into three parts. Section I outlines the thesis that Barry wants to defend and gives a brief sketch of the argument he employs to defend it. Barry's argument makes two claims – what I have termed the Sceptical Thesis and the Agreement Thesis. Section II therefore critically assesses Barry's defence of the sceptical thesis and Section III examines the agreement thesis. (shrink)

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global public health disaster driven largely by antibiotic use in human health care. Doctors considering whether to prescribe antibiotics face an ethical conflict between upholding individual patient health and advancing public health aims. Existing literature mainly examines whether patients awaiting consultations desire or expect to receive antibiotic prescriptions, but does not report views of the wider public regarding conditions under which doctors should prescribe antibiotics. It also does not explore the ethical significance of public views (...) or their sensitivity to awareness of AMR risks or the standpoint (self-interested or impartial) taken by participants. Methods: An online survey was conducted with a sample of the U.S. public (n = 158). Participants were asked to indicate what relative priority should be given to individual patients and society-at-large from various standpoints and in various contexts, including antibiotic prescription. Results: Of the participants, 50.3% thought that doctors should generally prioritize individual patients over society, whereas 32.0% prioritized society over individual patients. When asked in the context of AMR, 39.2% prioritized individuals whereas 45.5% prioritized society. Participants were significantly less willing to prioritize society over individuals when they themselves were the patient, both in general (p = .001) and in relation to AMR specifically (p = .006). Conclusions: Participants’ attitudes were more oriented to society and sensitive to collective responsibility when informed about the social costs of antibiotic use and when considered from a third-person rather than first-person perspective. That is, as participants came closer to taking the perspective of an informed and impartial “ideal observer,” their support for prioritizing society increased. Our findings suggest that, insofar as antibiotic policies and practices should be informed by attitudes that are impartial and well-informed, there is significant support for prioritizing society. (shrink)

‘Universal benevolence’ may be defined as the goal of promoting the welfare of every individual, however remote, to the best of one’s ability. Currently, the commonest model of universal benevolence is that of ‘impartiality,’ the notion promoted by Peter Singer, Roderick Firth, and others, that every individual (including oneself) is of equal intrinsic worth. This paper contends that the impartialist model is seriously flawed. Specifically, it is demonstrated that impartialist accounts of benevolence (1) attempt to draw positive moral conclusions (...) from negative premises, (2) draw actual conclusions from merely counterfactual premises, (3) fail to live up to stated claims of naturalism, and (4) give no compelling account of moral motivation. By contrast, I propose an alternate model of universal benevolence, grounded in the Stoic, cosmopolitan theory of oikeiôsis, i.e. ‘appropriation.’ Such a model, in contradistinction to impartiality, would see benevolence as the positive identification between moral agent and moral patient, rather than a charitable sacrifice of oneself for a distinct but equal other. An ethics of oikeiôsis has the further benefit of avoiding each of the four abovementioned conceptual pitfalls common to impartialist theories. (shrink)

To capture genuine utilitarian tendencies, (Kahane et al., Psychological Review 125:131, 2018) developed the Oxford Utilitarianism Scale (OUS) based on two subscales, which measure the commitment to impartial beneficence and the willingness to cause harm for the greater good. In this article, I argue that the impartial beneficence subscale, which breaks ground with previous research on utilitarian moral psychology, does not distinctively measure utilitarian moral judgment. I argue that Kantian ethics captures the all-encompassing impartial concern for the well-being of all (...) human beings. The Oxford Utilitarianism Scale draws, in fact, a point of division that places Kantian and utilitarian theories on the same track. I suggest that the impartial beneficence subscale needs to be significantly revised in order to capture distinctively utilitarian judgments. Additionally, I propose that psychological research should focus on exploring multiple sources of the phenomenon of impartial beneficence without categorizing it as exclusively utilitarian. (shrink)

Hugh V. Mclachlan Cet article est une réponse à la critique de Saunders de ma proposition de politique non conséquentialiste publiée précédemment concernant l’utilisation d’une loterie pour la distribution de vaccins rares par l’État face à une pandémie de grippe. J’y ai soutenu que, pour des raisons de justice, l’État devrait distribuer une partie du vaccin rare qu’il pourrait détenir à certains de ses employés de la santé et le reste aux citoyens de manière aléatoire et égale sur le principe (...) d’une loterie. Au coeur de la critique de Saunders se trouve l’affirmation selon laquelle j’ai omis à tort de prendre en compte les différences moralement pertinentes dans les besoins et la capacité de production entre les receveurs potentiels du vaccin. Le point central de ma réponse ici est que le fait que le besoin et la capacité de production soient ou non des facteurs moralement pertinents dépend de qui ou de quoi distribue le vaccin, à qui ils le distribuent et pourquoi ils le font. Par exemple, la discrimination entre les personnes dans la distribution de vaccins publics distribués à titre prophylactique sur la base de leur âge est injuste, qu’elle soit ou non moralement justifiable pour d’autres motifs. (shrink)

The distinction between egoistic and altruistic motivation is firmly embedded in contemporary moral discourse, but harks back too to early modern attempts to found morality on an egoistic basis. Rejecting that latter premise means accepting that others’ interests have intrinsic value, but it remains far from clear what altruism demands of us and what its relationship is with the rest of morality. While informing our duties, altruism seems also to urge us to transcend them and embrace the other-regarding values and (...) virtues constitutive of a good life. This rather wide conception of morality may strike us today as too demanding. At the same time, however, currently popular impartialist accounts of morality can disrupt much everyday altruism in their insistence that each person’s interests are weighed precisely equally. Having sketched this problematic of altruism, the second half of this Introduction outlines the arguments of the four papers and review essay in this collection, each of which, in a different way, negotiates the difficult relationships between egoism, altruism, morality and impartiality. (shrink)

This paper presents an analysis of the various dimensions of independence and impartiality. Among other things, I will argue that the two concepts, both of which are profoundly implicated in the rule of law, can be conceived as values and are perfectly distinguishable from each other. I will also propose a conception of neutrality, as a third distinct value that satisfies the requirement for non-redundancy with regard to independence and impartiality. Hence, judges and arbitrators must be independent, impartial (...) and neutral. Each of these values contributes in different ways to enabling the law to fulfil its distinctive function of facilitating social interaction in complex and plural societies. (shrink)

Most of us have been brought up on the idea that moral theories divide as they are, at the root, either deontological or consequentialist. A new point of division has been emerging that places deontological and consequentialist theories together against theories of virtue, or a conception of morality constrained at the outset by the requirements of the “personal.” In a series of important essays Bernard Williams has offered striking arguments for the significance of the personal in moral thought based on (...) the role of integrity in human activity and character. His criticisms of both Kantian and utilitarian theories for their deep-seated tendencies to undermine the integrity of persons brings to a new level of seriousness and subtlety long-standing complaints against these theories—the invasive do-gooding of utilitarianism, the coldness and severity toward normal human concerns of Kantian theory. Although Williams is inclined to find the sources of the attack on integrity in these different features of the two traditional theories, in the end his complaint against both of them turns on their demand that the moral agent submit himself to the authority of impartial value. (shrink)