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I want to make a general comment here about Rawls and the pursuit of what is sometimes called "impartiality."

I am really conflicted about this. I understand that we don't want racial prejudice to influence our principles of justice. I agree with John that one of the praiseworthy things about Rawls' Original Position is that it attempts to block out prejudice using a veil of ignorance. The Original Position is set up in such a way as to guarantee impartiality. But I'm not sure that the pursuit of impartiality is always the best road to take. Let me try to say what I mean -- and believe me, I'm not at all sure about this.

Rawls is one of a group of 20th-century Anglo-American philosophers who believe that the best way to formulate moral principles or moral judgments is to try to find out what disinterested parties would think, or what we would think in cool, detached moments, or in some special situation very unlike real life. When Rawls talks about achieving reflective equilibrium with our "considered" judgments, he is not thinking about judgments made when "we are upset or frightened, or when we stand to gain one way or the other." He wants dispassionate, non-self-interested judgments as raw material for his thinking. (See Theory, p. 47.)

It appears that judgments made by people when they are facing real moral problems are to be rejected in favor of judgments made dispassionately at a distance. The unemotional state of mind is preferred to the emotional, the hypothetical situation to the real. I'm not sure that I agree; and some philosophers, like Virginia Held, have argued against this view.

Held doesn't reject the whole process of reflective equilibrium, but she is more interested in starting with the judgments of real people in real situations and trying to integrate those judgements into a consistent whole instead of starting with the judgments that would be made by people in purified, detached, hypothetical situations.

Consider this example, taken from Held: There are two people, A and B. A is unemployed. B is an employed taxpayer. A believes that the government should act as the employer of last resort for persons like herself. B rejects this notion. Ten years later, A is employed and B is unemployed. A remembers what it was like to be unemployed, and her view of what the government should do has not changed. B now thinks that it would be a good thing for the government to create jobs. Held asks "Should we really suppose that the judgments these persons have arrived at on the basis of their actual situations are more suspect than the allegedly impartial judgments they thought they would arrive at on the basis of what they imagined they would hold if they were in the other person's situation?" (Rights and Goods, p. 46.) She believes that we should not, and I agree.

Here's another example. Imagine a person who goes into a wartime situation as a soldier and as a result changes his moral judgments about war. Should we assume that the judgment he makes in the actual situation is less trustworthy than the judgment he made at a distance?

Unlike Rawls, I'm not so sure that the search for impartiality is realistic or even desirable when we are trying to develop principles or to make moral judgments. Maybe we need a different starting point?