If you are trying to arrive at the most moral decision, should you seek to reason as impartially and objectively as possible, or should you allow your biases and personal, subjective preferences to play a role? Most people would probably go with the first option, but there are good reasons to reject it, at least when it comes to some types of choices.

In issue 23 of The Philosophers’ Magazine, Simon Eassom writes:

A man finds himself confronted by two people drowning. One of the two people happens to be his wife. He is only able to save one of the two people and must leave the other to drown. ...[I]f he had chosen to save his wife we would perfectly understand his motives... we would not condemn actions... we cannot have demanded him to do otherwise... we might even feel sympathy for him finding himself with such a terrible dilemma and faced with the almost inevitable solution that he must condemn the stranger to die because he cares more for his wife.

What are we saying here? Are we suggesting that the partial action of choosing his wife to be saved is understandable and we cannot condemn him, but it is not a moral action? Are we, in fact, saying that he is exonerated of any requirement to act morally in this situation?

This sounds completely absurd; however, it seems to be the direct consequence claiming that moral decisions require one to think and act impartially, that one not be biased for or against anyone’s interest before evaluating the situation. Perhaps, then, morality needs bias and partiality — at least some of the time.

Although the requirement of equality and impartiality seems to be taken for granted by most moral theorists, its acceptance by others is not at all commonplace. Morality has often been seen as culturally located as well as culturally specific. That is, not only are the kinds of duties I owe determined by my culture, but also my duties are owed only to my people and not to those outside my culture. [...]

Philosophers have reconsidered the heavy demand for complete impartiality that certain moral theories require. ... In short, if it not only seems natural, instinctive, psychologically stable, and completely rational to care about he well-being of one’s family more than the well-being of strangers, can it not also be moral to be so partial?

This issue has interesting implications for the debates about whether morality is objective or subjective. An objective morality seems to follow naturally from the idea that moral decisions must be arrived out via an impartial decision-making process. After all, it’s easier to arrive at the objectively correct conclusion if you try to free yourself from your biases.

However, what happens if we decide that morality can be or perhaps has to be biased and partial? Can we reasonably say that biased decision-making is a reliable method for arriving at objectively true conclusions? I doubt that. Biased decision-making is appropriate for arriving at subjective conclusions, so this would seem to indicate that morality is, at least in some aspects, subjective rather than objective.

 

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• Guide to Ethics and Morality
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