Impartiality: A Closing Note

Abstract

What is at issue in contemporary debates about the place of impartiality in ethics? As the contributions to this symposium show, it is not whether morality is founded on reason or on feeling. Both traditions in modern moral philosophy, that of Hume-inspired theories as well as that of Kantinspired ones, have made impartiality a basic feature of moral thought, and both for this reason have been attacked and defended in these debates. Indeed, to a great extent, the debates consist of attacks on and defenses of specific theories within these traditions, and several of the symposium's articles nicely represent this give-and-take. They contain exemplary attacks on and defenses of ethical theories in view of the fundamental importance these theories assign to impartiality in their accounts of moral judgment, and they forcefully indicate how these exchanges are being played out. Some of the articles, however, hint at something larger. These articles speak of the debates' participants as if they were members of opposing camps, the impartialists and the partialists, to use the 'ism's that have surfaced in the literature. As a result, they give the impression that these camps are contesting the ideal of impartiality itself and not merely the way it is rendered or deployed in this or that ethical theory. 1 The suggestion in this is that some philosophical question divides the debates' participants into opposing camps much as, say, the question of innate ideas divided rationalists from empiricists in early modern epistemology or the question of self-evident or immediately verifiable propositions divides foundationalists from holists in contemporary epistemology. Yet even in the