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A number of late 20th-century philosophers, especially feminist philosophers, have criticized impartiality as an ethical ideal. What is impartiaity? Is it possible to achieve it? To come close? Does it have any value? Can its deliverances be applied to real life? These are some of the questions raised. In the following passage Iris Young argues against impartiality as an ethical ideal.

A growing body of feminist-inspired moral theory has challenged the paradigm of moral reasoning as defined by the discourse of justice and rights. In this paradigm moral reasoning consists in adopting an impartial and impersonal point of view on a situation, detached from any particular interests at stake, weighing all interests eually, and arriving at a concusion which conforms to general principles orf justice and rights, impartially applied to the case at hand. Critics argue that this paradigm descripes not moral reasoning as such, but the specific moral reasoning called for in the impersonal public contexts of law, bureaucracy, and the regulation of economic competition. This "ethic of rights" corresponds poorly to the social relations typical of family and personal life, whose moral orientation requires not detachment from but engagement inand sympathy with the particular parties in a situation; it requires not principles that apply to all people in the same way, but a nuanced understanding of the particularitities of th social context, and the needs particular people have and express within it. Philosophers should recognize tha the paradigm of moral reasoning as the impartial application of general principles describes only a resticted field of moral life, and develop moral theories adequate to the private, personal, and informal contexts it ignores.... [Young, p. 96]

I argue that the ideal of impartiality in moral theory expresses a logic of identity that seeks to reduce differences to unity.
 [Young, p. 97]

In everyday moral life, prior to the totalizing moves of universal reason, there are only situatuated contexts of action, with all their particularities of history, affiliation, and preconceived value. The ideal of impartiality reconstructs this moral context into an opposition between its formally impartial aspects and those of its aspects that are merely partial and particular....The ideal of impartiality expresses in fact an impossibility, a fiction. No one can adopt a point of view that is completely impersonal and dispassionate, completely separated from any particular context and commitments. In seeking such a notion of mora reason philosophy is utopian; as Nagel expresses it, the impartial view is the view from nowhere....Rawls presents us with not so flashy a fiction [as Bruce Ackerman], but the original position which he constucts as the point of view of impartiality is just as utopian, especially in its provision of the veil of ignorance. The veil separates each from any knowledge of or connection with a particular history, set of group affiliations, or set of commitments, and the requirement of mutual disinterestedness ensures that none will develop among them as they talk....The ideal of impartiality is an idealist fiction. It is impossible to adopt an unsituated moral point of view, and if a point of view is situated, then it cannot be universal, it cannot stand apart from and understand all points of view. It is impossible to reason about substantive moral issues without understanding their substance, which always presupposed some particualar social and historical context.... [Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, p. 104ff, brackets added]