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Show Chapter VI. Moral Interiority 242 screen now in front of me; but also what might have existed in the present or past, or might someday exist in the future, such as a vintage restored1950 Remington Rand typewriter. The term modal imagination is intended to remind us of our interiorized capacity to envision what is counterfactually possible in addition to what is actual. I argued in the preceding chapter that modal imagination is what extends our conception of reality - and in particular of human beings - beyond our immediate experience in the indexical present. Here I argue further that we need to do this in order to preserve the significance of human interaction. To make this leap of imagination successfully is to achieve, not only insight, but also an impartial perspective on our own and others' inner states that recognizes and respects the symmetry between them. This perspective is a necessary condition of experiencing compassion for others. My conceptual analysis of compassion depends on the key concept of strict impartiality. In Section 6 below, I show that strict impartiality differs from impartiality in the ordinary sense, by adhering more closely than impartiality in the ordinary sense to the spirit as well as to the letter of what impartiality in the ordinary sense explicitly requires. However, I also show strict impartiality to be similar to impartiality in the ordinary sense, in that both are metaethical requirements on normative moral principles of judgment and conduct, rather than normative moral principles themselves. So my later analysis of strict impartiality requires establishing here what impartiality in the ordinary sense comes to. In the ordinary sense, a substantive principle is inherently impartial if it contains no proper names or rigged definite descriptions. But an inherently impartial principle may be applied prejudicially if it is applied only in some relevant circumstances and not others, or applied to suit the interests of some individuals and not others, or applied on the basis of attributes irrelevant to those explicitly picked out by the principle. So, for example, I violate the metaethical requirement of impartiality if I apply the principle of hiring the most competent candidate for the job only to the pool of candidates selected from a particular club or class or gender or race. This applicative notion of impartiality is also part of the ordinary usage of the concept. I am concerned with impartiality in this sense, in which it is the application rather than the formulation of the principle that is at issue. In the applicative sense, to be impartial in one's judgment is to ascribe an evaluative predicate to a subject on the basis of the attribute or attributes the predicate denotes rather than on the basis of some other, irrelevant attribute which one happens to value or disvalue. Without knowing what the substantive judgment is and on what attributes it is based, there is no way of determining whether or not one has judged impartially. For example, my judgment that you would make a particularly entertaining dinner guest is impartial if it is based on the high quality of your conversation and social © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
