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section 2 Impartial Thinking SOCIAL DETERMINISM CAN BE INVISIBLE 24 Part I —— theory Impartiality is necessary in order to ensure that the answers that you give to the value questions with which you are confronted are your answers and not answers that have been borrowed—subliminally or otherwise—from your parents, peers, reference groups, or culture. Impartiality, in other words, requires that you learn how to eliminate your own biases. Thus, the questions that now require our attention are these: 1. How can we free our decision making from the undue influence of the external environment? 2. How can we know if we have brought that about? Since all thinking is, as it were, invisible, how can we ever tell whether any of our judgments are really our own? Immanuel Kant argued that one cannot know simply by analyzing the content of a judgment whether that judgment is one’s own—i.e., whether it is free from the determining influence of external factors. Let us take the example of Joe forgoing the large and luscious piece of chocolate cake. Kant would say of Joe—or anyone else, for that matter—that we cannot know whether his decision to forgo the cake was or was not autonomous simply by examining what he decided to do. Kant argued that the only way to ensure that one’s judgments are in fact one’s own is to “neutralize” them through a particular reasoning process.14 This “thinking insurance policy” is necessary because the influence of external forces to which we are all exposed is so invisible. We are all constantly bombarded, silently or otherwise, with incentives to adjust our beliefs and opinions to conform to prevailing norms, the views of influential individuals, and pervasive media scripts. Because the power of these influences is so inconspicuous, we can never know for sure simply by inspecting the content of a belief or opinion whether it is actually our own or whether, in fact, it gained its original foothold or maintained life because of external factors. The only way to guarantee ownership of a judgment is to subject it to a process that neutralizes the potential force of external influence. “Bias” is the term we use to describe a preexisting way of viewing the world. One’s biases are not necessarily a product of external influence; one may have already spent a good deal of time and energy impartially thinking through an issue. However, one cannot rule out the possibility that external influence has nonetheless seeped in. The only way to know for sure that one’s judgments are in fact one’s own—i.e., that they are the product of one’s own thinking and not a result of silent external influence— is to think through every issue and situation anew in a way that is as impartial, or objective , as possible. The resulting judgment may well be the same as the one embodied by one’s original bias, but that is irrelevant. What is important is the process. It is only by embarking on a bias-neutralizing process that we have grounds for making the claim that our judgments are a product of our own thinking. It is only by embarking on a bias-neutralizing process that we become worthy of the dignity that Kant believed was the ultimate payoff of autonomy, or being one’s own person. This was the brilliance of Kant’s insight. The fact that a judgment comes out of one’s own mouth is not sufficient for claiming that that judgment is one’s own. Although biases are “in a sense” internal, they may nonetheless be a product of external influences. As Kant pointed out, it is the form, not the content, of the judgment that is important. It is the process, not the product, that is crucial. An analogy may help underscore the importance of the process. Let us suppose that you are in charge of a medical procedure that requires the use of sterile instruments . Let us suppose that the instrument packs that are available have already been sterilized, but their sterilization limit dates have run out. You speculate that the enclosed instruments may well be still sterile. However, the only way to ensure that they are, in fact, still sterile is to subject them once again to a sterilization process. It is imperative, of course, that the process you use to sterilize the instrument packs does not subject them to new contamination. As with...

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