Partiality

By Simon Keller

We are partial to people with whom we share special relationships--if someone is your child, parent, or friend, you wouldn't treat them as you would a stranger. But is partiality justified, and if so, why? Partiality presents a theory of the reasons supporting special treatment within special relationships and explores the vexing problem of how we might reconcile the moral value of these relationships with competing claims of impartial morality.


Simon Keller explains that in order to understand why we give special treatment to our family and friends, we need to understand how people come to matter in their own rights. Keller first presents two main accounts of partiality: the projects view, on which reasons of partiality arise from the place that people take within our lives and our commitments, and the relationships view, on which relationships themselves contain fundamental value or reason-giving force. Keller then argues that neither view is satisfactory because neither captures the experience of acting well within special relationships. Instead, Keller defends the individuals view, on which reasons of partiality arise from the value of the individuals with whom our relationships are shared. He defends this view by saying that we must accept that two people, whether friend or stranger, can have the same value, even as their value makes different demands upon people with whom they share different relationships. Keller explores the implications of this claim within a wider understanding of morality and our relationships with groups, institutions, and countries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: May 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9781400846382

Simon Keller

Simon Keller is associate professor of philosophy at Victoria University, Wellington. He is the author of The Limits of Loyalty.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Special Relationships and Special Reasons

HOW RELATIONSHIPS MAKE A DIFFERENCE

Imagine that you are watching television, and your show is interrupted by a news bulletin. There has been a fire, and several people have lost their homes. How would you respond? You might take no notice. You might feel a twinge of sympathy. If the story has an especially strong effect on you, you might donate some money to help the victims rebuild their lives.

Now imagine that as you watch the news bulletin, you recognize one of the houses that have burned down, and you recognize the owners. They are your parents. Now, how would you respond? You would feel much more than a twinge of sympathy, and you would be willing to do much more than donate some money. You would get to the scene as quickly as possible and offer all the support you could. It makes a difference that these people are your parents.

If a friend asks you to help him move house, you might happily agree, even though you would never do the same thing for a stranger. If your sister is having trouble paying her bills, you might give her some money, even though you would not help pay the bills of just anyone. If your son needs a new jacket, you might buy it for him, even though you would not buy a jacket for just any child who needs one.

We give special treatment to those with whom we share certain relationships. You treat a person differently if she is your friend or a member of your family. You may also treat a person differently if she is your colleague, your neighbor, your employee, or your compatriot. You may also favor your own country over other countries, your own team over other teams, or your alma mater over other schools. This is partiality.

Not only do we give special treatment to those with whom we share special relationships; we appear to do so for good reasons. We do not do special things for our friends and family members just because we feel like it. Showing a special preference for your friends and family members is not just like preferring chocolate ice cream to strawberry. If you did not treat your own friends and family differently from how you treat strangers, then there would be something wrong with you. When you rush off to be with your parents after hearing of the fire, you will probably take yourself to be doing something you ought to do. Even if you do not especially feel like going to comfort your parents—perhaps you have had a long day and would like to watch the rest of your television show—you might go anyway, because you think you should. They are your parents, after all.

NORMS OF PARTIALITY AND REASONS OF PARTIALITY

The existence of a special relationship can make a difference to what you are required to do; perhaps you have a duty to provide for your own children, but not for all children. The existence of a special relationship can make a difference to what you are allowed to do; perhaps you are permitted to break an appointment to look after your sick husband, but not to look after just any sick person. And, the existence of a special relationship can make a difference to what it makes sense for you to do, without making a difference to what you are required to do or allowed to do; if your friend is renovating his house, you may have a special reason to invite him to live with you for a few weeks, even though you do not have the duty to issue the invitation, and even though you are permitted to issue it to anyone you like.

In all these ways, and perhaps others too, your special relationships are normatively significant or make a difference to your normative situation. Putting it another way, your special relationships make a difference to the standards of assessment to which your acts are answerable. An act that would otherwise be optional can be made compulsory; an act that would otherwise be forbidden can be made permissible; an act that would otherwise make no sense can be made perfectly sensible; and so on. The standards to which our acts are answerable can be called norms, and the special standards to which our acts are answerable because of our special relationships can be called norms of partiality.

Sometimes, a special relationship changes your normative situation by giving you reasons to perform some acts rather than others. A reason to perform an act is a consideration that counts in favor of the act, in one way or another. A reason to act, that is to say, is a consideration that really counts in favor of the act, not one that merely seems to count in its favor, or that someone merely thinks to count in its favor. (On this way of talking, all reasons are good reasons; a bad reason is no reason at all.) A reason of partiality is a reason that is generated by a special relationship, or that you have because you are in some special relationship. Perhaps one consideration that counts in favor of your rushing to your parents’ side after hearing of the fire is that it will bring comfort to your parents. If so, then that is a reason for you to rush to your parents’ side. If it is a reason you have because these people are your parents, then it is a reason of partiality.

In other cases, a special relationship may make a difference to your normative situation without generating reasons. The fact that you are in a certain special relationship may give you permission to do something without giving you any reason to do it. Perhaps you are allowed to send your own child to piano lessons, but not to send just any child to piano lessons, but whether you have a good reason to send your child to piano lessons is a separate question.

(This case might be explained as one in which your special relationship takes away a reason that would otherwise be there. Perhaps you have a reason not to make other children go to piano lessons, but you do not have the same reason when it comes to your own child; perhaps that is what it is for you to have a special permission to make your child go to piano lessons. So perhaps the difference made by your special relationship here can be explained as a difference made to your reasons. But this is neither obvious nor, for present purposes, important.)

REASONS AND MOTIVES

The considerations counting in favor of our acts are not necessarily the considerations by which we are moved to act. Our reasons can be different from our motives. When you rush off to be with your parents after hearing of the fire, you might be moved by the thought that your parents are in distress and would benefit from your presence, or by the thought that it is your duty to be with your parents in their time of need, or by the thought that people will think badly of you if they find out that you knew about the fire and decided to stay home and watch television. Any of these considerations may be among your motives, but it is a separate question whether any of them counts as a reason.¹

Although there is a difference between reasons and motives, in asking questions about the one we can find cause to ask questions about the other. Reasons can sometimes refer to motives; perhaps you have a reason to favor a friend over strangers only if you regard her with the right motives. And our motives can sometimes reveal something about our reasons; we might learn more about your reasons for favoring your friend by looking more closely at your motives for favoring your friend, in a case in which your motives appear to get it right.

THE PUZZLE OF PARTIALITY

We are subject to norms of partiality, and from one point of view, such norms are not at all mysterious. Of course it makes a difference that a person is your mother, and not a stranger. From another point of view, however, partiality is puzzling. There is a natural, compelling picture of morality into which norms of partiality do not appear to fit.

One basic moral truth is that everyone matters and no one matters more than anyone else. This thought lies behind an influential picture of morality, which is sometimes called the picture of impartialist morality, or of liberal or Enlightenment morality. According to the picture, the individuals who matter morally are those with some specified inherent property—some morally significant feature that they hold independently of their relationships with others—and our job as moral agents is to give a certain response to that property wherever it is found. On one version of the picture, the morally relevant property is the capacity for enjoyment and suffering and our moral task is to maximize enjoyment and minimize suffering, regardless of whose enjoyment or suffering it is; this is a utilitarian moral theory. On another version, individuals matter morally if they are autonomous and our moral task is to treat all autonomous creatures as ends and never merely as means; this is a Kantian moral theory. Another version of the picture might say that individuals matter morally because they have rights and our moral task is to avoid ever infringing on anybody’s rights.

If morality is all about promoting overall enjoyment and minimizing overall suffering, or treating all autonomous creatures as ends, or respecting everybody’s rights, then special relationships would not appear to hold any moral significance. No one comes to have a greater capacity for enjoyment and suffering, to be more autonomous, or to have different basic rights just because she is your friend, or just because she has any other particular connection to you. So why should a person’s particular connection to you give you any reason to treat her differently from how you treat others? Why should the fact that someone happens to share some relationship with you make a difference to how you ought to treat her, or how you may permissibly treat her? This is the puzzle of partiality.

The puzzle of partiality is not a mere theoretical artifact. We cannot make it go away just by saying that impartialist moral theories are wrong. The puzzle arises from something true. Those we treat differently from everyone else, within our special relationships, are not more important than everyone else. You prioritize your own children’s needs over the needs of other children, but the needs of other children matter just as much as the needs of yours. You make sacrifices for your friends that you do not make for other people, but your friends do not matter more than other people. Looking at it from one perspective, the puzzle of partiality cannot be avoided. We need some explanation of why we have good reasons for acting partially, rather than impartially.

The puzzle of partiality might be easy to solve. On the one side, it could be said that the perspective from which the puzzle arises—a perspective that takes impartiality as the natural starting point—is simply mistaken, even if seductive; perhaps the perspective of morality is not an impartial perspective after all.² On the other side, it could be said that reasons of partiality can easily be incorporated within the impartialist picture; perhaps there are good impartial reasons for each of us to give different treatment to those with whom we share special relationships.³

A glance at the philosophical literature suggests, however, that the puzzle of partiality is a genuine puzzle and that any solution to it will have ramifications for our thinking about the nature of morality. Philosophers use insights about partiality to argue, for example, that consequentialist and Kantian moral theories must be abandoned;⁴ that liberalism should give way to communitarianism;⁵ that liberal morality needs to be supplemented by another ethical framework with which it is necessarily in tension;⁶ and that not all good reasons are moral reasons.⁷ Considerations of partiality have also pushed defenders of various impartialist views to make their theories more detailed and sophisticated, and to see more clearly what parts of commonsense morality their theories can and cannot vindicate.⁸ The debate about reasons of partiality is a site at which higher-level claims in ethical theory are tested and brought into conflict.

One way to try to make progress on the puzzle of partiality is to begin with a particular theoretical perspective and then to see whether it can yield a plausible account of our reasons of partiality. Another, which I pursue in this book, is to begin with norms of partiality, trying to understand what they are and where they come from, and then to see what the significance of partiality is for ethics more broadly.

Let me register a quick point about my terminology. The book is about the normative significance of special relationships, and that normative significance is not (or not obviously) all about reasons. My topic is norms of partiality in general, not the reasons of partiality in particular. But, at places at which I think it makes no difference to the substance of what I am saying, I often talk of reasons rather than norms. This is because I find talk of norms less natural and to lead to some awfully convoluted locutions. When it comes to the philosophy, however, I am concerned throughout the book with all kinds of norms arising from special relationships, not just with reasons.

THE QUESTION

Why should we give special treatment to those with whom we share special relationships? What, for example, is your reason for treating your friends differently from other people, or your children differently from other children?

To make this a question that might have a single enlightening answer, we need to focus on reasons that not only direct us to give special treatment to those with whom we share certain relationships but also appear to have something especially to do with those relationships themselves. Sometimes, when you have a reason to treat someone differently from others, your reason can be derived straightforwardly from some different reason that has nothing especially to do with special relationships or partiality. You might have reason to give somebody special treatment because you promised to give her special treatment; perhaps you promised someone that you would keep an eye on her father. You might have reason to give somebody special treatment because you were instructed to give her special treatment; perhaps your boss has buddied you up with a new colleague. You might have reason to give somebody special treatment because you were assigned the job of giving her special treatment by some legitimate procedure for dividing responsibilities; perhaps it has been agreed that you will look after the baby while someone else takes care of the older children. Your reasons to give special treatment in such cases do not raise any questions about partiality in particular. They instead concern your wider reasons to keep your promises, follow instructions, or carry out your assigned responsibilities.

In paradigmatic cases, our special reasons within special relationships are not so easily reducible to other reasons. You have special reason to look after your parents, but you probably cannot point to any particular promise, command, act of assigning responsibility, or anything else from which your reason obviously derives. Your reason seems to have some more intimate connection with your parents and your relationship with them.

Reasons can be given at different levels of explanation, and the more finely we distinguish various reasons of partiality, the less they have in common. Your reason to go to dinner at your mother’s house tonight, for example, is not the same as my reason to buy my son a new jacket this winter. Yet, your reason to have dinner at your mother’s appears to have something in common with my reason to buy my son a jacket, but not with your or my reasons to keep our promises or help a stranger in need. You, with your mother, and I, with my son, each have reasons that emerge from special relationships. We work at the appropriate level of explanation when we try to say what that similarity is.

Whatever our reasons of partiality all have in common, we should not assume that they are thereby set apart from all other reasons. It could be that the right way to explain our reasons of partiality is to show that they fall, after all, within some broader class of reasons. Perhaps our reasons of partiality are reasons to keep implicit promises, for example, or to promote happiness in the most efficient way possible, or to carry out the responsibilities we are assigned (or should be assigned) by society at large. Also, it may be that the class of reasons of partiality is not unified. Perhaps there are many different kinds of explanation for the many different reasons of partiality, and no level at which those explanations share an interesting common character.

Those possibilities noted, however, the appearance remains. There do seem to be reasons, all recommending special treatment within special relationships and all unable to be straightforwardly explained by some broader kind of reason, all sharing a distinctive character and presenting a shared challenge to the impartialist picture of morality. Even if the appearance is deceiving, the appearance needs to be explained, and an explanation of why the appearance is deceiving will itself be one kind of story about the nature of the reasons concerned.

AN OBVIOUS ANSWER?

Here is an obvious answer to the question of why you should treat your parents differently from how you treat other people: they are your parents, and other people are not. Similarly, your reason to give special treatment to your children is that they, unlike other children, are your children, and your reason to give special treatment to your friends is that they, unlike other people, are your friends. As a general matter, we might say, reasons of partiality are facts about the existence of special relationships.

This answer