the value people set on the belief that their lives and institutions are justiWable to
others. (Scanlon 1998 , 163 )
The speciWc examples oVered suggest not only that we have a general desire to
justify to others but that, in political contexts, we have a more speciWc desire
to justify to those who do least well in society. Thus, in the case of the civil
rights movement, white people have a desire to justify their institutions to
black people, and that desire reXects the commitment to equality that is
central to impartiality. We need to assure ourselves that the principles
governing our society are such that they can be defended even to those who
do least well under them. And if we cannot provide such a justiWcation, as was
the case in America in the 1960 s, we stand accused, in our own eyes, of
betraying the ideal of equality on which impartiality rests.
Two points are worth emphasizing here: theWrst is that the appeal to
agreement is intended to provide a guarantee that all are considered equally;
the second is that, by appealing to an agreement motive, Scanlon raises the
important, but often neglected, question of compliance—of how and why
people might be motivated to act on impartial principles, especially when
they conXict with more partial concerns. These two features of the agreement
account of impartiality make it superior to, but also more demanding than, a
utilitarian defense.
To take theWrst pointWrst, one problem with a utilitarian way of working
out the commitment to impartiality is that insofar as utilitarianism is a
maximizing doctrine, it threatens to condone arrangements that secure great-
est overall beneWt but do so at the expense of some individuals. As we have
seen, the point applies most starkly to act utilitarianism, but it is not conWned
to it: to return to the two-level account discussed earlier, even if we suppose
that utilitarianism operates at the level of principle selection we must ac-
knowledge that the principles chosen will be chosen because and insofar as
they tend to maximize overall beneWt. There is, however, no guarantee that
those principles will be justiWable to the people who do worst under them,
and it is this feature of utilitarianism that prompts John Rawls to reject it
because, he says, it ‘‘does not take seriously the distinction between persons’’
(Rawls 1971 , 187 ). It may be that the allegation is misplaced and that some
suitably sophisticated version of utilitarianism could avoid it. Whatever the
truth on that, however, the crucial point here is that impartiality, understood
as reXecting a commitment to equality, calls for principles that can be shown
to have taken everyone into consideration. A form of impartiality that is
impartiality 429