Impartiality and partiality

 Partiality and Impartiality

 

 

The philosopher Bernard Williams famously wrote that, for someone faced with a lethal emergency in which he can only save one of several persons, amongst who is his wife, his decision to save her is not an instance of a general moral principle that in such circumstances it is permissible to save one’s spouse. That would be “a thought too many”. On the contrary, the decision to save a loved one is made because he or she is the one who is loved

 

This is one example of Williams’s insistence that the central concerns and projects of an agent’s life are not circumscribed by any “morality system”, because many concerns and projects have nothing or little to do with morality (which is not say that they are thereby immoral).

 

Ifd Williams is broadly correct that moral claims compete with, and do not necessarily win out over, other claims, might there be some disturbing implications?

 

One such implication can be teased out from the “saved spouse” example. Here the agent’s concern, overriding all others, is that a potential victim is his wife, and he wants to save her before anyone else. This suggests, in this case,  the trumping motivational power of kinship. And this in turn suggests that some theories of evolutionary morality may be correct – that altruistic and cooperative behaviour developed in small kinship groups, knit together by a common interest in survival; small family groups eventually growing into tribal, and then increasingly complex, societies.

 

A consequence of the growth of mutual obligations in social units is that there may be a stark border between the “in” group of persons and those outside (this is not to forget that sociieties also grade the otherness of their own members, especially women). In many places, at many times, beware being an outsider. There may be no scruple in wronging you, or killing you.

 

At some point, or at various points, in human development, philosophers and evolutionary historians agree that human capacity for disinterested reasoning (not merely serving kinship ends) developed moral codes that, with many bumps on the road, began to recognise and theorise about a “universal” humanity and “universal” moral systems. Which is roughly where we are arrived at today in most of our philosophic deliberations. But Williams would caution (leaving aside much technical reasoning about moral ‘knowledge’): “don’t be so sure”. Partiality lurks, very deep rooted – possible beyond eradication.

 

In the Western European world, Christianity was to bring a universal religion and moral code for “all men”. But the prism of tribalism refracted its message in different shapes onto nation states and rival schisms, creating anew “in” and “out” groups over the centuries – the latter frequently not to be given any moral consideration, absent recantation, repentance or conversion. Factionalism, and the hostilities it engenders, seems one of the natural states of humankind. The Enlightenment, purveyor of Reason, has not prevented terrible conflicts.

 

Consider the notorious Trolley Problem. As I wrote last year, in the traditional setting of the problem, the trolley tracks are populated by stick people – 5 in danger, one not (yet). Make your choice as to where to send, or allow to go, the runaway trolley. 

 

But replace the stick people by – 5 strangers, one spouse or child; 5 asylum seekers, one popular prime minister; 5 members of your family, one unpopular prime minister – and the elastic of your moral judgment will stretch and twang, as Williams would expect.

 

We are equipped with the rational capacity to overcome partiality. But in all circumstances of moral choice? Williams says not, or rather that it would dehumanise us to insist on the primacy of impartiality. This is not to say that some form of evolutionary selfishness should blindly rule us. Williams emphasizes the tragic nature of some choices, when perhaps we do not save a child or spouse because our duty demands that we take the decision that will save a country or city. In the classic example (Williams revered the ancient Greeks) King Agamemnon, overall leader of the Greek assault on Troy, must sacrifice his daughter Iphigeneia to placate the gods, before his war fleet can sail. This choice is about which of two loyalties “wins”. These choices are not soothed away by any moral code.

 

Reason has enabled incremental but hugely significant changes in the boundary between “us” and “them”, in some times, and some places; especially in the status of women, the ending of slavery, the acceptance of different sexual orientations. These gains are uneven and contingent. They are, as modern politics nearly everywhere bear witness, still contested.. One thing is certain: there’s as yet no such thing as a universal moral code which Reason compels all to accept.

 

June 2022