To what extent is impartiality a necessary condition of moral judgements?

Before exploring whether impartiality is a necessary condition of moral judgements, it is important to define impartiality. Impartiality is the act to separate your own emotional perspective of a particular situation from a decision, or in other words a moral judgement, you will make. Within the light of this clarification, I will explore whether it is more effective to detach oneself from personal emotion when making moral judgements. I do believe that one ought to detach oneself from emotional engagement when making moral decisions because this impartiality provides a more accessible moral compass. When relativism and an idea of partial moral judgments becomes acceptable, ethics and morality’s definition and purpose becomes too flexible to hold meaning because everyone has their own definition of what they class as moral. Impartiality avoids this and enables making moral judgements to obtain clarity and reasoned judgment. Before exploring whether impartiality is a necessary condition of moral judgements, it is important to define impartiality. Impartiality is the act to separate your own emotional perspective of a particular situation from a decision, or in other words a moral judgement, you will make. Within the light of this clarification, I will explore whether it is more effective to detach oneself from personal emotion when making moral judgements. I do believe that one ought to detach oneself from emotional engagement when making moral decisions because this impartiality provides a more accessible moral compass. When relativism and an idea of partial moral judgments becomes acceptable, ethics and morality’s definition and purpose becomes too flexible to hold meaning because everyone has their own definition of what they class as moral. Impartiality avoids this and enables making moral judgements to obtain clarity and reasoned judgment.

However, in account of this, it is clear that banishing impartilaity from moral judgements seems somewhat impossible. Moral actions meet human's needs of self-fulfillment, human's always have an element of imparliality in their thought process when making moral acitons or decisions. Fundamentally, even when we act morally we are always acting imparitally as the moral act has a form or emotional benefit to us. For example, volunteering for a charity cake sale will, unavoidably, make oneself feel proud and satisfied as you have helped others and have sacrificed your own time to do so, therefore fulfilling the definition of acting upon something due to impartiality. This argument acts in accordance to Hobbes's theory of the state of nature in his book, Leviathan. Hobbes states that humans instrinically are in 'a state of war' where everyone is 'against eveyone'. Humans cannot possibly escape the emotional motives of moral decision making, and therefore impartiality is fixed within the human condition. Is it not a question as to whether impartiality is reaosnable, but rather to what extent human self interest govern's morality.

Answered by Josephine S. Philosophy tutor

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