Inpartially on Gods

It’s natural to think that when it comes to morality, we should be impartial. And yet almost everyone thinks it is appropriate to treat certain people, like those who are near and dear to them, in a special sort of way. For example, while having food and clothing is clearly a good, it seems that I have a special obligation to my own children over the children of strangers to make sure that they have food and clothing. So we have two moral claims:

Impartiality: When it comes to morality, we should be impartial.

Partiality: It is appropriate to treat certain people in a special sort of way.

There seems to be some tension between these two thoughts. To avoid it, we must either (1) reject the claim that we must be impartial, or (2) reject the claim that it is OK to be partial to certain people, or (3) come to understand impartiality in a different way.

Why We Should Be Impartial

Why think that we must be impartial and treat everybody alike? First, there is something intuitively appealing about the thought that morality requires us to be “as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator.”1 One might even say that the moral point of view just is the impartial point of view. After all, isn’t the point of ethics to step back and try to discover moral principles that apply to everyone? To say that someone acted impartially is often meant to imply that she acted rightly.