iii. The Practical Impossibility of Being both Impartial and Well-informed

The third article, with the impractically long title of The Practical Impossibility of Being both Impartial and Well-informed (PIBIW), makes a first pass at dealing with the idea of the impartial spectator itself, an idea that, as we have seen, is central to the first two articles. The background to this article is a problem pointed out by Fonna Forman (2010), namely that, within the framework of TMS, the two qualities supposedly belonging to an ideal spectator, impartial and well-informed, are to some extent opposed in what they demand of us: To be well-informed—to properly understand the situation and character of the person we judge—we must, typically, be sufficiently physically close to that person to see with our own eyes what they are going through (TMS, I.i.1.4, p. 13;

Forman-Barzilai, 2010, p. 142). At the same time, this kind of physical proximity tends to entangle us in precisely the kinds of emotional bonds that hinder an impartial evaluation.

Thus, according to Smith, we must turn to close friends to be understood (TMS, I.i.4.9, p.

28), and to distant strangers to be judged impartially (TMS, III.3.38, p. 178). However, the close friend, who understands our situation only too well, will tend to judge us partially, while the distant stranger, who does not know our situation well enough, will tend to make an ill-informed

judgement. In other words, neither friends nor strangers fulfil the ideal of the spectator who is both well-informed and impartial, and it is difficult to see who could fit the bill. Therefore, if it really is the case that the ideal of judgement is to be both impartial and well-informed, then it seems we have before us an insurmountable task, in as much as attaining these two traits requires us to be both close and removed, both friends and strangers, at the same time.

Forman does not pursue this problem any further, nor have I been able to find any attempts at solving it in the secondary literature. As far as I can tell, there are two ways of responding to the problem as Forman presents it. The first is to deny that it is a problem in any practical sense, since, in addition to our own efforts to see ourselves from without, we can consult both friends and strangers, thus triangulating something like the reaction of an ideal spectator between the three of us. The problem with this first response is that it is far from clear how this triangulation would take place. How do we disentangle the positive effect of understanding from the negative impact of partiality in the judgements of our friends? How do we know which parts of a stranger’s reaction to us is the result of her limpid vision, and which are distortions from her ignorance?³⁵ It may well be that such triangulation is the closest we can get to seeing ourselves as an impartial and

well-informed spectator would see us, but simply to dismiss the tension between understanding and impartiality on the basis of the possibility of such triangulation seems premature.

The second way of responding to the problem is to note that the entanglement of

understanding and impartiality is normally the result of close and repeated physical contact (PIBIW, p. 112).³⁶ Put simply, friends become friends (in part) through repeated interactions in physical spaces, interactions that simultaneously engender mutual understanding and the kind of affective bonds that precludes dispassionate judgement. Thus, the tension we observe between understanding and impartiality, between the roles played by friends and strangers as spectators of our conduct, may be a contingent effect of interactions in physical space, rather than a necessary tension between impartiality and understanding. In other words, we can recognise the tension between understanding and impartiality as a real, practical problem affecting our moral judgements, but deny that it is inescapable. If Smith is right that sympathy is based on an act of the imagination, regardless of whether we are friends or strangers, then it seems we could be both impartial and well-informed spectators of others if we rely on our powers of imagination to bring their cases home to our own breasts while remaining strangers to them, thus becoming well-informed without the emotional entanglement that precludes indifferent impartiality (PIBIW, p. 112).

The problem with this response, is, as I show in PIBIW, that the tension between

understanding and impartiality runs deeper than previously appreciated. Indeed, this tension seems to be a product, not of interactions in the physical space, but of the entanglement of information with space in our minds.

My argument for this claim is built upon a psychological theory on the connections between construal level and psychological distance, known as Construal Level Theory (CLT, Trope &

Liberman, 2010). Briefly put: Proponents of CLT maintain, on the basis of a wide range of experiments, that the level of detail in our thinking of something and the perceived distance between ourselves and that thing are linked. If we construe something abstractly, we will also tend to perceive that thing as distant to ourselves. If we construe something concretely, we will tend to perceive it as close. Moreover, if we perceive something as close to us, whether in time, in physical or in social space, or in how likely it is to happen (or have happened), then we will also tend to construe that thing more concretely. Conversely, if we perceive something as being far away from us in one or several of these dimensions, our construal will also tend to be more abstract. Smith’s favourite metaphor for the imaginary work that goes into sympathy, the metaphor of ‘bringing the

36 Today, that contact may also take place predominantly or even exclusively in virtual spaces, but the mechanisms appear to be similar (Wilson, Boyer O’Leary, Metiu, & Jett, 2008).

case home’, turns out to be an accurate description of how a detailed construal of something also tends to bring that something psychologically closer to us.

And so what, you may wonder? Well, as it turns out, construal level and psychological distance also affects our moral judgements (PIBIW, pp. 117-118). There are, that is, clear experimental indications that we judge moral transgressions differently depending on whether we construe them abstractly or concretely, and, correspondingly, whether we perceive them as distant or close to us (Mårtensson, 2017). Notice the implication of this: Bringing the case home, which was supposed to be a way of keeping our disinterested distance while also becoming sufficiently well-informed, necessarily involves a reduction in psychological distance, which in turn affects our moral judgement (typically by making us more lenient, but if we are emotionally entangled in the case, so that bringing the case home inflames our resentment, our judgements may also become harsher than they otherwise would be, PIBIW, p. 118).

Bringing someone’s case home to our own breast, then, makes us partial to—or, sometimes, biased against—that someone, even if she was initially a perfect stranger to us. In other words, the tension between understanding and impartiality is not merely an accidental by-product of

interactions in physical space. The tension appears to be rooted in the very functioning of our minds. Hence, the tension between understanding and impartiality appears all but inescapable.

As I intimated above, we might be able to deal with this inescapable tension in practice through a process of triangulation between our own efforts at seeing ourselves from without, our friends’ overindulgence, and the insensitivity of an impartial stranger. However, the very idea of the impartial and well-informed spectator plays such a central role in Smith’s model, not to mention in the solutions proffered to the problems surveyed in the two first articles of this dissertation, that to simply leave it in place, after acknowledging the deep tension between the two qualities this ideal asks us to aspire to, strikes me as not very satisfactory.

Moreover, the whole point of the impartial spectator was that this was not supposed to be some philosopher’s invention, some abstract and unreachable ideal. The figure of the impartial spectator was supposed to be a person we were all familiar with, and the idea of this spectator as an ethical ideal for which we should aspire something achievable, something within reach—at least for some of us, some time. To admit that the impartial spectator is ‘essentially Janus-faced’, as Forman puts it, and still go on to hold it up as the ideal for which we should strive seems somehow disingenuous. For, if the impartial and well-informed spectator really is an unreachable ideal, why settle for second-rate idealism? Why not go for something like Roderick Firth’s ‘ideal observer’

(1952) or Richard M. Hare’s ‘Archangel’ (1981, p. 44)? At least they make the most of their ideality (PIBIW, p. 121).

The right response is not, however, to abandon the ideal of the impartial and well-informed spectator. Smith’s choice of a non-ideal ideal was, I think, essentially right. Only, later research has revealed that we are still less ideal, or non-ideal in different ways, than Smith recognised (PIBIW, p.

121-122). The correct response, I suspect, is not to abandon our ideal, but, somehow, to remould it.