THE GOOD MORAL DECISION AND IMPARTIALITY

MORAL DECISION

A moral decision is a choice made based on a person's ethics, manners, character and
what they believe is proper behavior. These decisions tend to not only affect your
well-being, but also the well-being of others.

The concept of impartiality has an important place in modern conceptions of morality.

It is commonly held that morality requires an agent to be always impartial in assessing
the morally right course of action in a given situation. This means that when assessing
the rightness of an action, we should avoid being influenced by our personal values,
biases, and inclinations, as well as the contingent situation we happen to be in. This is
the standard view in contrast with moral partialism. Moral partialism is the view that
it is at least sometimes morally permissible for our actions to be shaped by our
personal values, biases, inclinations, or by the particular situation in which we find
ourselves. Although generally defended against partialism, the standard view is itself
not monolithic. Some of its defenders hold that it is not sufficient to simply defend
impartiality, but that we have to defend the right kind of impartiality. This implies that
different types of impartiality can be distinguished first, and then assessed according
to some principle that ranks them from adequate to inadequate. Amartya Sen has
provided one such honing of the concept of impartiality.1 In his recent works, Sen
draws a distinction between two types of impartiality, dubbed closed and open
impartiality, and offers a principled ranking of them. Sen argues that closed
impartiality suffers from what may be called exclusionary bias. He then defends open
impartiality on grounds that it is better equipped to capture cosmopolitan values
needed in a plausible conception of global justice. We will consider this distinction
and identify some difficulties that arise when it is put under scrutiny. Although Sen is
right that a plausible application of impartiality ought to overcome particular biases,
this ought to be done without distinguishing between types of impartiality. Sen
distinguishes between two types of impartiality. One is closed impartiality, defined as
the procedure of making impartial judgments invoking the members of a focal group.
The other is open impartiality, defined as the procedure of making impartial
judgments without invoking any focal group at all. Closed impartiality can be
schematized as follows. Let us suppose that a decision is to be taken by the members
of a society or their representatives, 334 IDIL BORAN where the decision is such that it
will affect the lives of the members of the society. The decision will be impartial if its
justification is not shaped by the particular situation of some members of the society.
The interests of everyone count and they count equally. Impartial judgment requires
participants to remove themselves from their personal biases in such a way that the
decision does not unfairly disadvantage some members of the society against other
members for reasons that are morally arbitrary. This conception of impartiality is not
uncommon. A well-known example is found in John Rawls’s conception of justice as
fairness. Impartiality plays a central role in the justification of the principles of justice
underlying the basic structure of society. Rawls’s theory offers primarily a method
of justification of the principles of justice that is to be fair and it does so by appealing
to the device of an original contract. According to this method, the justification of the
principles of justice would itself be fair if the principles are principles that all
contracting parties could accept when placed in an equitable situation of choice. A
situation of choice is equitable if the parties, when choosing the principles, abstract
themselves from their personal biases, inclinations, and the contingent situations in
which they are. The parties are to abstract themselves from the knowledge of their
social status, wealth, talents, and all other information that can potentially distort
their judgment in their favor. This exemplifies closed impartiality, according to Sen’s
distinction, because the impartial procedure invokes a focal group. The focal group is
a single society viewed as a fair scheme of cooperation. Sen sees a number of
problems with closed impartiality construed thus, two of which are as follows. One
problem is what Sen calls procedural parochialism. Closed impartiality is vulnerable to
the pitfalls of procedural parochialism, because while it requires individuals to remove
themselves from their individual biases, it does not make the same requirement
about possible group biases.2 The other limitation is exclusionary neglect. Closed
impartiality is vulnerable to the pitfalls of exclusionary neglect, because while it
requires that individuals making decisions within the focal group take into
consideration the interests of individuals within the focal group, it does not make the
same requirement about the interests of individuals who fall outside the focal group,
even if their lives are affected by the decisions.3 These two objections share one
feature. Either the perspective or the interests of those who fall outside the focal
group of impartial reasoning are not counted in. For the sake of brevity, let us refer to
the type of bias that excludes either the perspective or the interests, or both, of those
outside a given focal group as exclusionary bias. This problem is of relevance to the
recent debate, among political philosophers, regarding the nature, scope, and limits
of global justice. The growing technological and economic interdependence between
states generates the need for a conception of justice that goes beyond the traditional
self-contained