Just Love: Transforming Civic Virtue

3. The Dilemma of Impartiality: Legacy of the Bishopand the Chambermaid

73 3 The Dilemma of Impartiality: Legacy of the Bishop and the Chambermaid The conventional ideal of impartiality can’t be lived with because it demands superhuman detachment from one’s personal commitments, dismisses the ethical relevance of such commitments, and obfuscates real differences between citizens. On the other hand, it can’t be lived without because some notion of critical fair-mindedness is required for political life. Although the suspect lineage of the stranger-versus-loved-one (SVLO) cases seems on the face of it to encapsulate the biases of gender and religion that rendered civic virtue incoherent, both impartialist and partialist ethical reasoners continue to presume that they elucidate impartiality. Many partialists complain that the resulting view of impartiality is unattainable. This critique is insightful but inadequate. It is insightful because it calls attention to the chasm between the ideal of impartiality and the reality of how one might, pragmatically, cultivate that ideal. But it is inadequate in two ways: it fails to recognize the confusion in the ideal itself, and it fails to recognize that partialist ethical approaches often fall prey to the same confusion. What is impartiality? The failure of the SVLO cases to answer that question clearly has enormous ramifications, since the cases continue to infiltrate political theory. Thus, pervasive understandings of impartiality in political theory are ambiguous. 74 · The Dilemma of Impartiality The Bishop and the Chambermaid: Confusion amid the Flames Many problematic conflations are built into the very structure of the SVLO cases. Impartiality as a structural form of reasoning is conflated with impartiality perceived as a substantive moral norm. The distinction between universality and generality is unhelpfully blurred, and thus their relationship to impartiality remains unclear. Moral justification is conflated with moral motivation, despite critical differences between them. Impartiality itself is conflated with impersonality and dispassion. This formulation structurally precludes moral distillation of “reflective equilibrium,” a stable balance between moral experience and ethical reflection. It precludes any connection between the “heroes” of the cases and ordinary moral heroes such as MADD. Since Godwin’s case, first articulated in eighteenth-century England, is an “impartialist” vignette most frequently cited by contemporary “partialist ” opponents, a careful analysis of that scenario can elucidate how SVLO cases skew both impartialist and partialist moral argument.1 Recall that Godwin asks readers to imagine they can save only one of two potential victims from a fire. The two caught in the flames are a well-known humanitarian archbishop and the rescuer’s chambermaid. Which ought be saved? Clearly, the archbishop, according to Godwin, who goes on to insist that the archbishop would remain the correct choice even if the chambermaid were the rescuer’s wife, mother, or benefactor: “Of what consequence is it that they are mine? What magic is there in the pronoun ‘my’ to overturn the decisions of everlasting truth?” (Godwin 1926). Impartiality: Form, Substance, or Both? Godwin’s partialist attackers assume his scenario demonstrates that impartiality precludes considering certain persons as special because of our particular relationship with them. Marcia Baron (1991) calls this assumption into question, wondering what Godwin’s answer would be if the alternative were between saving two chambermaids, one of whom was the rescuer’s mother and the other a stranger. Presumably, the rescuer would be free to save her mother, since the overall social utility of the two potential victims would be roughly equal. The Dilemma of Impartiality · 75 Baron claims that in the end Godwin’s disdain for the pronoun “my” derives from his utilitarian sense of promoting the general good, not from a governing view of impartiality. (Contemporary partialists reproduce the conflation when they cite rigid utilitarians such as Peter Singer [1994] or Jonathan Glover [1977] as typical, rather than extreme, proponents of impartiality.) One could press Baron’s point by asking whether certain interpretations of impartiality might demand tossing a coin to choose the lucky rescuee—if, for example, the rescuer’s worldview demanded respect for the inherent sanctity of life rather than for aggregate utility. As Baron notes, it matters what question one asks from an impartial perspective. Thus, defenders of impartiality stress that requirements of impartial ethical justification do not, in fact, demand detachment from personal loves as a superior mode of living. Thomas Hill protests that: impartiality . . . is part of an ideal for moral legislation, or general debate about moral principles and values; it is not a recommended way of life. Unfortunately...