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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 263 5. Blum's Argument Against Impartiality Now to take up in greater detail Blum's characterization of impartiality as being unbiased by one's personal preferences or interests in one's treatment of others. Blum adds that it involves "giving equal weight to the interests of all" (44). Presumably he means "equal weight other things equal," since, as we saw in Section 1, it would be a sign of bias, not impartiality, to give equal weight to the interests of the homeless and to those of billionaire real estate developers in distributing governmental funding for affordable housing, when the interests of the homeless weigh so much more heavily. We can say, then, to begin, that to be impartial is to treat competing preferences and interests on their own merits and without being biased by one's own. Even with this adjustment, impartiality remains a metaethical requirement rather than a normative moral principle, since we must first know what these interests are and for what they are competing - information provided in the normative principle to be applied - in order to identify the nonarbitrary attributes relative to which the principle can be impartially applied. In all such cases the requirement of impartiality directs us to apply a normative principle of conduct evenhandedly. It does not tell us which normative principle to apply. In these three concluding sections I show that compassion requires not only a symmetric imaginative involvement with another person's interiority, but therefore a disposition to impartiality of treatment as well. Clearly, impartiality as just characterized presupposes modal imagination. It requires one to imagine as depth objects interests and preferences that one may not have, and may never have had. This requires of one an imaginative involvement with the inner states of those who have them. As we have seen, such an involvement is a necessary condition of the ability to form universal concepts of inner states such as love, fear, desire, or joy - concepts that extend backward into a counterfactually possible past and forward into a possible future. Modal imagination is what enables one to apply these concepts to instances of possible in addition to actual experience, and so to apply them to the imagined inner states of others of which one has no actual experience at all. that he takes pleasure in what causes us pain, and feel inclined to try to reform him. But this would be paternalism at best, meddling at worst. Suppose, however, that the correct description of the masochist is that he takes pleasure in his own pain; i.e., that he experiences two opposing states, consecutively or simultaneously, where we would feel only one, namely pain. Then we might both empathize and sympathize with his pain, and also feel an inclination to render aid - an inclination that is, however, dampened by our recognition that, astonishingly, he would prefer none. In this case I think we should simply say that we feel compassion compounded by incomprehension, frustration, revulsion, and so forth. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
