Impartiality-themed chapters

The essays supporting this ideal provide, for the most part, little if anything in the way of a general account of impartiality. Rather, they approach the topic indirectly by developing theses that have an interest and importance of their own, whilst reflecting an impartialist view to some degree.

I will emphasize in this particular set the interesting and well-constructed chapter by Michael Ridge. Ridge focuses on the situation in which two or more people are joint holders of the same duty (e.g. two parents have made a promise to their son to take him to a friend's house, for a visit, one day each week). The key idea is that each one then should do his or her respective fair (i.e. proportional) share (p. 194). But sometimes people don't do their fair share (or any share at all).

Imagine here persons in a larger group – ten people, say – who have a single bill for their meals (a bill which says that each individual's meal costs the same). When we come to the tip, one or two won't pay or pay enough (pp. 205–7). The question is: what is one's fair share in a situation of partial compliance or non-compliance?

Liam Murphy has argued that the maximum share that each of the remaining tip-payers is obligated to pay is one's share (in a situation of full compliance). Ridge argues that non-compliance here has placed burdens not only on the remaining tip-payers but also on the waiter. He argues next that proportionality (fair shares) should continue to operate in a situation of partial compliance or non-compliance (in order to avoid putting the full burden on the back of the designated beneficiary of the joint duty – here the recipient of the tip). Accordingly, people may be required to do or pay more than would be their fair share under full compliance (pp. 212–13, 217). Moreover, they should, in a situation of partial compliance, be allowed under fairness to do more than their share as determined by what is appropriate or fair for them in a situation of partial compliance (p. 215).

Why allowed? Because there are often other rationales for doing more – afforded by considerations of beneficence or fidelity (to promises) or legitimate expectation or gratitude. Realistic cases involve many variables (including the costs of dealing with non-compliance). The fair-shares principle tells you what fairness as an impartial standard requires. But fairness is not the whole story and is not always enough.

Another interesting and important chapter is the one by Gerald Gaus. He begins by suggesting that each person must exhibit equal respect for the rationality of all those who participate in common with them in the project of interpreting what morality requires of each and all (pp. 42, 63). To this end, Gaus develops a Public Justification Principle: ‘M is a (bona fide) moral requirement only if each and every Member of the Public P has sufficient reason(s) R to accept M as a binding requirement on [themselves]’ (p. 47).

Gaus then conducts a complex argument (in sections 3 and 4). This argument presupposes the fact of pervasive evaluative pluralism and uses Rawls's collective-choice approach to constructing public reasons for a rationally justified morality. Here Rawls builds on the idea that social relations should be cooperative relationships.

On the basis given, Gaus develops two ideas for rational agreement. (1) There is presumably some set of moral rules that would be preferred by everyone over having no rules at all. These preferred rules are the eligible set from which we start (section 5). (2) Next then, a selection or further elaboration from among the rules in the eligible set could be generated by the various agents’ willingness to coordinate yet further (for even greater cooperative benefits). Here, relying solely on each person's ordinal perceptions of ‘how well an option satisfies [their respective] evaluative criteria’ (but not agreeing with one another's first choices), these persons have reason to coordinate rather than to have no further rule or requirement in that particular area at all (p. 57). Free and equal rational persons will find, Gaus says, that there are ‘increasing returns’ from ‘coordinating on a common understanding of moral requirements’ – so long, of course, as we always stay within the eligible set in devising these requirements. We can call this newly formed set of coordination-based requirements the ‘optimal eligible set’ (p. 63).

The two sets together serve a very important function in morality. The optimal eligible set, in particular, constitutes an impartial rational standard, the best we have available, by which one can adjudge or appraise current, conventional moral practices in a given society.

Brad Hooker's chapter aligns nicely with Gaus's in that he too is concerned with appraising moral rules. Hooker begins by arguing that ‘common-sense morality endorses constrained partiality’; partiality seems essential to personal relationships and thus partiality would be extremely hard to ‘stamp out’ even if one wanted to (p. 34). Of course, we know that common-sense morality and partiality sometimes can, and indeed will, conflict with the maximizing of aggregate net benefit. We may sometimes side with the latter in cases of conflict, but not always.

What is needed, then, is some sort of impartial (agent-neutral) way to assess first-order moral rules, to see which ones might be choiceworthy in cases of conflict with one another or with other normative standards (pp. 26, 35, 39–40). Let us take, then, the two leading candidates for the impartial grounding of substantive principles and rules – (a) rule-consequentialism as a principle and (b) Kantian or Rawlsian contractualism. Put modestly, Hooker's proposal is that where both (a) and (b) converge on the same set of credible rules then those rules are good rules (pp. 40–1).

Such an appraisal is very helpful to have in view when a good rule conflicts with a not-good rule. Of course, the appraisal is not so helpful when two good rules conflict or when a good rule conflicts with what the maximizing of aggregate net benefit requires on a given occasion.

The final chapter I want to discuss under the heading of impartiality is David Estlund's. In section 1 he develops the idea that a certain range of agent-centred individual choices (prerogatives) is ‘insulated’ in liberalism from an impartial morality that requires the maximizing of agent-neutral value (p. 225). Could one reconcile such a morality with such prerogatives?

Here Estlund introduces the idea of ‘leveraged enhancements’. For example, a public radio or TV fund drive announces that someone will match your pledge; there's still a prerogative involved but one now has an incentive (itself agent-neutral in character) to pledge more than one had planned. (I have myself reacted positively to such leveraged enhancements.)

Next imagine that the enhancement is increased considerably – my pledge will be matched tenfold, let's say. Presumably, the continuous raising of the enhancement will eventually cross a threshold so that the individual's option is replaced by something mandatory – by an obligation (pp. 232–4). Estlund's key point, then, is that ‘leveraged enhancements’ may sometimes change the agent's act from optional to obligatory (p. 236); leveraging can make a normative difference (p. 240), can in effect change the agent's moral status.

I have my doubts about this line of analysis. The duty of beneficence holds for everybody. It's an imperfect duty in that the agent has considerable discretion as to when, where, how it might be exercised. The change Estlund describes is not a change from an option (a permission) to an obligation. The duty of beneficence has been there all along. Rather, what changes is that a highly increased enhancement makes more demanding, adds stringency to, the idea that one should do X now (where X is already included, presumably, among the multifarious objects of one's discretionary exercise of that duty).

Partiality-themed chapters

The essays supporting this ideal provide more in the way of a general account of partiality and of direct support for partiality-based reasons for acting. This is unlike the chapters in the first set we examined, where the dominant ideal there was addressed and supported more indirectly. I will emphasize in this particular set – the partiality set – two interesting and well-constructed chapters, one by Samuel Scheffler and the other by John Cottingham.

Scheffler begins by noting two distinct senses of ‘partiality’: (a) bias and (b) preference; his argument will concern only the latter (pp. 98–9). His chapter provides a substantive and powerful argument that considerations of partiality (of agent-centred preferences) are compatible with morality, indeed that morality actually incorporates reasons of partiality (pp. 100–1, 128).

Scheffler's background argument for this line of thought is that people engage in valuings all the time and that attitudes appropriate to valuing (including agent-relative preferences) provide reasons for action. People have many relationships, so there will be important relationship-dependent reasons for acting; people individually engage in projects that are important to them; so there will be lots of personal project-dependent reasons for acting as well. People also belong to certain groups and associations; the reasons afforded by membership may be of lesser importance than the first two kinds, but they are not negligible (when there are benefits of membership for the individuals involved). Thus, we have as well membership-dependent reasons.

All these reasons reflect a degree of partiality, of agent-relative concerns. In section 5 Scheffler (operating from what might be called a normative perspective) carefully distinguishes these three kinds of reasons from one another in interesting ways. But they all manage to retain validity as reasons for acting, and as reasons compatible with morality.

Some philosophers have suggested that moral reasons (even moral reasons that appear to be relationship-independent) are per se relationship-reasons – in that both kinds of reasons arise in the same way (p. 114). This conflation of relationship-reasons (or of membership-reasons) with moral reasons in general is a view Scheffler cannot endorse (see section 6 for his reasons).

But relationship-dependent reasons (and perhaps membership ones) – since they are reciprocal in nature and give rise to claims, legitimate expectations, etc., on one another – have a distinctively deontic character (p. 126). They are like moral reasons in this respect. However, they are not and cannot be the whole of morality. Scheffler develops this line of thought in section 7.

We should not be seduced by the importance of the partiality-themed reasons we have been discussing into thinking that we can deal with real-world moral issues posed by distant others, by far-off strangers who are hungry or sick and in need of aid or who require rescue from the dangers of oppression and depredation. To focus always on personal relationships distracts us from, and makes it impossible to attend to, the needs of those outside the circle of small-scale interpersonal relationships and personal projects (pp. 126–7).

The points just made reflect, in Scheffler's view, the continuing appeal of consequentialist and other lines of impartialist moral thought. Scheffler develops this final, very important, thought and summarizes his general argument in section 8. (I should add that Scheffler's chapter is being published independently in a collection of his own papers.)

Sarah Stroud sets out an engagingly written account of partiality that overlaps with Scheffler's at a number of points. She does, of course, indicate points where their views and focuses differ. Most important is her emphasis on permissible partiality and, in particular, on shared projects/plural agency (pp. 145–7). The latter is an addition to partialist thought that is well worth making (and, interestingly, it shares common ground with Ridge's impartialist discussion of joint duties).

Stephen Darwall's chapter overlaps with Stroud's chapter to a degree in Darwall's emphasis on collective intentions and overlaps with Scheffler's discussion of personal relations on the point that such relations have a reciprocal, hence deontic, character. Darwall's account, putting emphasis as it does on respect for others and on dignity, has an especial psychological richness.

The other chapter in this set – the partiality set – that I wanted to emphasize is the one by John Cottingham, whose main focus is on intra-personal ‘ethical formation’. By this he means the gaining of an intellectual and emotional grasp of the ethical significance of our own lives (pp. 65–6). Such a focus on ‘how should I live?’ does not, in his view, automatically and immediately raise questions about one's relationship with others, thus raising in turn issues of partiality/impartiality (pp. 66–7).

The quest for self-improvement does accord one's ‘own life a special importance’; people find that they individually have certain gifts, talents or capacities (along with certain resources) that only they can foster and utilize (pp. 68–70). But the stewardship of, the responsibility for developing, these abilities does not amount to egocentrism; at the same time, of course, the role of being self-steward for one's own gifts and one's own time cannot be identified with an impartial perspective – such as, for example, global welfare-maximization (pp. 70–1).

There is no general rule as to how much time and energy one should devote to the self-stewardship of one's capabilities and to the disciplined development of one's character. The duty in question is a duty of ‘wide obligation’ (Kant) and presupposes the satisfaction of one's strict duties (p. 73). Such an approach allows one maxim of ‘wide’ duty to limit another – so that over a lifetime the duty of beneficence is fulfilled, through the exercise of discretion, mutually and in tandem with the duty of self-development (pp. 74, 76). In the end, the realization of one's goals cannot be conceived in isolation from the realization by others of their goals (p. 81).

Cottingham, at the conclusion of his chapter, says that today we have considerable knowledge of the condition of distant others (not true of people's knowledge of such others in olden times) and perhaps we have a greater capacity to offer aid and rescue to far-off strangers than did the people of several centuries ago. So the scope of our responsibilities regarding distant others has grown and this too has to be factored in (pp. 82–3). This chapter is an unusual and interesting piece.

It is true of this anthology, as it is true of most, that it has no sustained authorial voice and no sustained discussion throughout of its main themes. Even so, several of the chapters in this volume make important, even substantive, contributions to the literature and are of considerable philosophical interest.