On the Practical Impossibility of Being Both Well-Informed and Impartial

Abstract

Adam Smith argued that the ideal moral judge is both well-informed and impartial. As non-ideal moral agents, we tend only to be truly well-informed about those with whom we frequently interact. These are also those with whom we tend to have the closest affective bonds. Hence, those who are well-informed, like our friends, tend to make for partial judges, while those who are impartial, like strangers, tend to make for ill-informed ones. Combining these two traits in one person seems far from straightforward. Still, if becoming well-informed is, as Smith also claims, a matter of imaginative perspective-taking with the “person principally concerned” (TMS, I.i.1.4, 13), it might be possible to become well-informed without the emotional entanglement that comes from any actual proximity to those we judge. Against this intuition, I use Construal Level Theory to show that the tension between being well-informed and impartial is likely to persist even if we take any actual proximity out of the equation. I end by discussing some implications of this, and suggest that we should consider revising the ideal to accommodate them.

Epistemic justice for the dead

“…Collins (2004) has advanced a distinction between contributory and interactional expertise that takes a different view: that contributory expertise, the ability to write an article, is basic, and interactional expertise, the ability to understand it and comment on it, with the implication that the person who possesses contributory expertise has the capacities of the interactional expert and something more. But Sivertsen (2019) has recently shown that there is a cognitive science basis for thinking that the capacity to judge and the capacities characteristic of the specialist are not only distinct but conflicting. This was a point also made by James Bryant Conant in his writings on science, which noted the tendency for scientists to fall in love with their own ideas.…”