On the Practical Impossibility of Being Both Well-Informed and Impartial
dc.contributor.author | Sivertsen, Sveinung Sundfør | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2019-11-15T12:31:15Z | |
dc.date.available | 2019-11-15T12:31:15Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2019 | |
dc.Published | Sivertsen SSS. On the Practical Impossibility of Being Both Well-Informed and Impartial. Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics. 2019;12(1):52-72 | eng |
dc.identifier.issn | 1876-9098 | |
dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1956/21003 | |
dc.description.abstract | Adam Smith argued that the ideal moral judge is both well-informedand 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. | en_US |
dc.language.iso | eng | eng |
dc.publisher | Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics (EJPE) | eng |
dc.subject | Adam Smith | eng |
dc.subject | impartial | eng |
dc.subject | well-informed | eng |
dc.subject | conventionalism | eng |
dc.subject | Construal Level Theory | eng |
dc.subject | proximity | eng |
dc.subject | bias | eng |
dc.subject | perspective-taking | eng |
dc.title | On the Practical Impossibility of Being Both Well-Informed and Impartial | eng |
dc.type | Peer reviewed | |
dc.type | Journal article | |
dc.date.updated | 2019-10-09T14:50:55Z | |
dc.description.version | publishedVersion | |
dc.rights.holder | Copyright the author | eng |
dc.identifier.doi | https://doi.org/10.23941/ejpe.v12i1.377 | |
dc.identifier.cristin | 1735652 | |
dc.source.journal | Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics |
Files in this item
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
-
Department of Philosophy [249]