In a seminal paper from 1998, Helga Kuhse, Peter Singer, and Maurice Rickard (hereafter referred to as KSR) defend impartial over partial moral reasoning, outlining these two kinds of moral reasoning, or perspectives, as follows:
“Partial moral reasoning… involves judgments that emphasize personal relationships and attachments. These sorts of judgments and dispositions differ from impartialist judgments in that they favour people with whom we are personally connected over people with whom we are not. Impartialist reasoning, by contrast, … involves judgments and dispositions that are detached and do not favour personal attachments.” (H. Kuhse, P. Singer & M. Rickard, 1998, “Reconciling Impartial Morality and a Feminist Ethic of Care”, The Journal of Value Inquiry 32, p. 453.)
In short and simplified, KSR’s argument for impartial morality looks as follows: (1) Either (a) morality is fundamentally divided into a partial type of morality and an impartial type of morality with no common ground, or (b) one of these two perspectives must be the most fundamental one, in terms of which the other one should be understood. (2) Option (a) would involve “a fairly radical and unsettling conclusion about morality” and should therefore be rejected. (3) The perspective we have reason to believe to be the most fundamental one is the perspective with the best explanatory power. (4) The impartial perspective is the perspective with the best explanatory power, since it best explains our widely held pre-theoretic moral intuitions and our empirically observed dispositions to approach moral problems. (5) Consequently, we have reason to believe the impartial perspective to be the most fundamental one, in terms of which the partial perspective should be understood. (pp. 457ff.)
In this talk, we problematize this argument and distinguish between two different ways in which impartial moral reasoning can be understood. We refer to these as internal and external impartiality, respectively. Internal impartiality concerns the judgements and dispositions of the acting agent, while external impartiality concerns the judgements and dispositions of someone other than the acting agent, for instance an idealized hypothetical agent judging or responding to the judgements and dispositions of the acting agent. While KSR seem to be concerned with internal impartiality, we argue that external impartiality can do a better job with regards to both explanatory power and reconciling the partialist and the impartialist perspectives.
First, we note that KSR’s argument rests on a false dichotomy. Besides the two alternatives in option (b) above, a third possibility is that the partial as well as the (internally) impartial perspective can be explained in terms of some other, even more fundamental component of sound moral reasoning. Second, we argue that there is indeed such a more fundamental component of sound moral reasoning, namely the widely accepted requirement of universalizability (see T. Jollimore, 2014, “Impartiality”, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), ed. E. N. Zalta.). Third, we explain how we take external impartiality to be related to the requirement of universalizability.