| OCR Text |
Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 265 impartiality defended in Volume I, Chapter VIII.3.2. So, for example, an impartial application of the principle of directly apportioning quantity of resources to need in the distribution of governmental funding for affordable housing would not give any special weight to the need of the distributor to cement her political alliances. Nor would it tailor the application of this principle to her personal or social connections to billionaire real estate developers. An impartial application of this principle would compare the respective inner states of need of all designated parties relative to one another, on the basis of a symmetric, empathic imaginative involvement with those of each, and distribute the funds accordingly. Such a distribution presumes no solution to the problem of interpersonal comparisons discussed in Volume I, Chapter IV.1, since a symmetric empathic understanding of another's inner states does not aspire to the objective quantifiability of those states. Indeed, the irreducibly qualitative variety among such states precludes this. As suggested in Section 4, it assumes, without being able to show or prove, the capacity of one's modal imagination to subjectively represent as depth objects the quality and intensity of others' inner states with some degree of de facto accuracy. This capacity is based on an empathic comprehension of the behavior that ordinarily accompanies them, and on rough and ready behavioral interactions that then enable one to finetune one's empathic insights. It also assumes one's capacity to preserve the distinctive quality and intensity of each such imaginative object with equal vividness, simultaneously in one's consciousness. It assumes, that is, our ability to experience walking and chewing gum at the same time, even when it is oneself who is doing the walking and another who is chewing the gum. 6 And it assumes one's ability to compare such vividly imagined objects with respect to one's subjective representation of their quality and intensity. In a symmetric empathic understanding of another's inner states, the scale of quantitative calibration among these states as imaginative objects is a function of their relative effect on the subject. It is ultimately the quality and relative intensity of one's own experiences that are being compared. Some philosophers have offered procedural accounts of impartiality. It has been claimed, for example, that impartiality of judgment is what results from putting oneself in the place of the individual whose preferences are being judged7; or that it results from discounting one's own interests and Obviously this assumption becomes more problematic as the number of empathees increases. Possibly some adaptation of the method of pairwise comparisons might be useful here. 7Rawls reconstructs this view from Hume and attributes it to classical utilitarianism in A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971). See pp. 33 and 184-7, and also 27-8. Also see Lawrence Kohlberg, "The Claim to Adequacy of a Highest Stage of Moral Judgment," The Journal of Philosophy LXX, 18 (October 25, 1973), 630-646. 6 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
