Just Love: Transforming Civic Virtue

6. Impartiality-as-Practice: The Lesson of Ordinary Moral Heroes

203 6 Impartiality-as-Practice: The Lesson of Ordinary Moral Heroes We have seen the structural parallelism between the dilemma of objectivity in science, the dilemma of love in Christian theology, and the dilemma of impartiality in political theory. In each case, a central ideal of the tradition came to be viewed as a “can’t live with it, can’t live without it” ideal. Science and Christian theology have resolved their dilemmas by turning to the observation of practitioners to articulate pragmatic ideals of objectivity and love rather than trying to elaborate metaphysical definitions of those ideals. I propose that political ethics could benefit from imitating the resolution of the other two traditions. What positive reclamations of “impartiality” might result if we look to practitioners? What practitioners can we identify who seem to be capturing the intuitive good of impartiality as critical fair-mindedness, while avoiding idolatry? Can we articulate the internal goods of their practice that might be the “baby,” rather than the “bathwater,” of impartiality? A striking irony is immediately apparent when this project is undertaken as a constructive challenge. In philosophical circles, the concept of impartiality is under concerted attack, but in everyday life people continue to appeal to some commonsensical notion of impartiality and to assume its coherence. The coherence of lay notions of impartiality is particularly clear if we consider perceived failures of impartiality. In everyday life, parents with an obvious favorite child, teachers with an obvious pet, T-ball coaches 203 204 · Resolving the Dilemma who give some teammates far more playing time than others, the bride who chooses only three of a group of four close friends to be bridesmaids because the fourth is not very pretty, are all widely criticized for a failure to be impartial. Is it possible to articulate the inverse positive ideal implied in such recognized failures? If one strives for such articulation, the flaw of the stranger-versusloved -one cases is clarified by contrast. The practitioners of impartiality that we can most readily observe are the ordinary moral heroes of our lives—good parents, teachers, coaches, friends. In everyday cases of parents who appropriately arbitrate attention among multiple children, teachers who appropriately arbitrate attention and encouragement among students, and friends who arbitrate energies among friends, the moral accomplishment is decidedly not a Solomonic resolution of SVLO tensions. It is the attainment of critical fair-mindedness among passionate loves. Might that moral accomplishment—what I call “personal impartiality”— be a first step toward the attainment of fair-mindedness among strangers ? Could it be the “tacit knowledge” that underlies all wider senses of impartiality? How might its accomplishment by ordinary heroes in their personal lives suggest political ideals of impartiality that could arbitrate relationships among strangers? While even young children understand ideals of personal impartiality —such as when they whisper “teacher’s pet” under their breath—philosophers and political theorists fail to see that impartiality is at stake in such judgments because they have defined impartiality as irrelevant to personal realms. Significantly, those realms are the ones in which young future citizens will first be formed morally. Ordinary Moral Heroes: Four Contrasts to the SVLO Cases The paradox of ordinary moral heroes makes them the ideal starting point for reconsidering impartiality. They are ordinary because we may encounter them in daily life. They are heroes because they inspire us in profound ways. They provide lifelong, pervasive influences on one’s worldview. They are, in fact, the starting point for moral education of the citizen. Before a citizen can read about Archimedean points or debate what constitutes appropriate public justification, she learns from ordinary moral heroes Impartiality-as-Practice · 205 what it means to listen attentively, to deliberate choices, to arbitrate and negotiate tensions, and to be fair. Certainly, one of the great oddities of conventional accounts of impartiality is that they ignore how one could ever learn to be impartial—how one could grow from being a child to being a citizen. In the words of Margaret Urban Walker, what seems called for but curiously absent in philosophical discussions of impartiality is a “moral pragmatics”: “A moral ideal needs an implementation, a way of bringing it into contact with actual possibilities and practices of moral reflection and argument. . . . Yet philosophical discussions of impartial thinking seem lax, where not actually reductive, with respect to this” (1991, 759). Ordinary moral heroes press the promising direction that crosscuts otherwise diverse...