abandon our personal commitments and do the thing that impartial morality
would have us do.
Iris Young goes further when she argues that, in politics, the ideal of
impartiality is, in fact, an ideology. It purports to treat all equally but, by
denying signiWcant diVerences between people, it in fact ‘‘allows the stand-
point of the privileged to appear as universal’’ (Young 1990 , 116 ). Her allega-
tion, to which we will return later, is that political impartiality is merely a
form of sectarianism—the means whereby the powerful legitimize what is in
fact the illegitimate imposition of their own views on others.
Here, then, are three questions about impartiality: What is it? What does it
require of us? And is it desirable, or even possible, to act in accordance with
its dictates? In what follows these questions will be addressed under three
headings: ‘‘Impartiality in Everyday Action;’’ ‘‘Impartiality and Agreement;’’
and ‘‘Higher-level Impartiality.’’ TheWrst aims to show that impartiality is
best understood as applying to moral rules and principles, not to everyday
actions; the second to show that impartiality is best interpreted as a matter of
what people could reasonably agree to; the third to show that, so understood,
it can escape the charge of being sectarian or ideological.
1 Impartiality in Everyday Action
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As has been noted already, impartiality is widely understood as reXecting a
commitment to equality. However, in our ordinary lives we do not always
treat others equally, nor do we believe ourselves morally required to do so. On
the contrary, we tend to favor our friends and family over strangers, and we
often feel that we are morally entitled to do so. Indeed, there are some
contexts in which a requirement to treat everyone equally—to show no
partiality towards my friends or family—would be positively perverse.
Thus, Charles Fried notes that ‘‘it would be absurd to insist that if a man
could, at no risk or cost to himself, save one of two persons in equal peril, and
one of those in peril was, say, his wife, he must treat both equally, perhaps by
Xipping a coin’’ (Fried 1970 , 227 ). Thoroughgoing impartiality—impartiality
of the kind that requires us to give no greater weight to our spouse than to a
impartiality 425