Doing the Impartial Thing

Not so fast. To see the criticism of friendship, and to start to see some of the important differences between modern and ancient moral philosophy, consider a famous and controversial case from the late eighteenth century offered by William Godwin.

Godwin asks us to imagine that the palace of Fenelon, the archbishop of Cambray, is in flames. (You probably have imagined this many times before already.) The death of the archbishop would be a great loss to the community—or, at least, we are asked to assume so. The flames threaten his life as well as the life of his valet, and you are only able to save one of them. Whom should you choose? For Godwin, the choice is obvious: you must save the archbishop. So far, the case is not particularly controversial.

However, we are next asked to imagine that the valet is no stranger, but is instead your brother, father, or friend. Morally speaking, does this make a difference? For Godwin, the fact of this relationship changes nothing. He challenges us: “What magic is there in the pronoun ‘my’, that should justify us in overturning the decisions of impartial truth?”⁵³ The valet may by my friend, but this fact is simply overridden by the moral requirement of impartiality. The fact remains that a greater good results from the rescue of the archbishop, and so it is his life that we are morally required to save. Morality, for Godwin, makes no special allowances for our own partial attachments and inclinations such as our friends.

While this case may seem crazy and counterintuitive, the reasoning that Godwin employs here in 1793 reflects an emphasis on impartiality that would’ve seemed alien to Aristotle, but that is foundational to most modern thought about right and wrong. This modern moral emphasis on impartiality can be seen most clearly in the most widely discussed moral theory of the modern era: utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is a kind of consequentialism: it requires us to choose actions that can be reasonably expected to bring about the best consequences overall. Utilitarianism follows this formula and further specifies that we should choose actions with the most “utility,” which is usually defined as something like pleasure, happiness, welfare, or preference-satisfaction. In asking us to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people, the ‘greatest good’ is an impartial notion, and utilitarians have typically emphasized the moral importance of impartiality. But does morality really require you to save the archbishop and forsake your friend? Do you really have to be this cold and clinical in order to be a good person? This moral puzzle is a problem for utilitarians, and it is puzzle for anyone who takes seriously the moral importance of impartiality.

No One to Count for More than One

Jeremy Bentham is often credited with being the founder of utilitarianism. His most important work, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, was first published in 1781 and spells out many of the core tenets of utilitarianism, including its emphasis on the moral importance of pain and pleasure. We can see the deep impartial foundation of the theory in perhaps the most famous quote attributed to Bentham: “everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one.” This saying is actually not found in Bentham’s own work, but rather is offered as “Bentham’s dictum” by John Stuart Mill in his own masterwork on the theory, aptly called Utilitarianism.

While Mill’s version of the theory is different from Bentham’s in many respects, Mill certainly adheres closely to the most fundamental features of Bentham’s theory, including its impartiality. This isn’t a big surprise: Mill’s rigorous education as a child was guided by his father James, who was Bentham’s close friend and follower. Mill declares, for example, that we are required to be “as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator.”⁵⁴ To the ideal spectator, all persons are strangers, and so in cases like Godwin’s burning palace, personal feelings (like love for a father or friend) never complicate his moral deliberations.

This fundamental emphasis on impartiality is carried over through virtually all subsequent formulations of consequentialism. Henry Sidgwick, an influential utilitarian from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, describes the theory as endorsing actions “which will produce the greatest happiness on the whole; that is, taking into account all whose happiness is affected by the conduct.”⁵⁵ A contemporary defender of consequentialism, Shelly Kagan, observes that morality “bids us to act not with an eye to merely furthering our own projects and interests, or those of some individual we may favor—but with regard for the interests of all individuals, the world as a whole, overall good.”⁵⁶ Another contemporary consequentialist, Peter Singer, who has argued for “the principle of equal consideration of interests,”⁵⁷ extended the moral requirement of impartiality to other species. For Singer, while this does not require the equal treatment of humans and animals, it does require equal consideration.

Here is the modern moral challenge to friendship laid bare: friendship is an inherently partial relationship, where each of us devotes a disproportional amount of time, energy, and resources to our own friends. These are the operational costs of friendship—to have a friendship, we must invest ourselves in it. And when we’re standing outside of the archbishop’s burning palace, it makes a big difference to us that one of the people trapped by the fire is our friend. Yet, if morality requires that we be impartial, how can we favor our friends? As another ethicist, John Cottingham, has observed, if we really want to be impartial, it seems as if we have to banish our special feelings for our friends from all decisions of moral consequence.⁵⁸ The love we feel for them becomes a kind of obstacle to doing the right thing. And this is not some strange, marginal view in moral philosophy; on the contrary, it seems to directly follow from the central role that impartiality plays in modern moral philosophy.

Many have taken this worry to be damning for such a strong moral emphasis on impartiality. Bernard Williams, for example, is a critic of consequentialism who is famous for complaining that this kind of impartial moral reasoning contains “one thought too many.”⁵⁹ Williams imagines a case that is structurally similar to Godwin’s puzzle about the archbishop: there has been a shipwreck in which a man can either rescue a stranger or his wife from drowning, but not both. To decide this, impartiality requires that we think the way the ideal spectator would think. Is the stranger closer? More likely for me to succeed in rescuing? Am I permitted to act on my desire to save my wife instead of him?

Whether or not the man eventually saves his wife is irrelevant to Williams’s worry. Rather, his objection is simply that there is a deliberative process at all. In other words, a man committed to this kind of consequentialist impartiality must first consider whether or not he is morally permitted to save his wife. If he does indeed save her, he only does so because the rescue would be a means to doing the most impartial good. It is this extra deliberation, this extra reason needed for saving her, which is the ‘one thought too many’. Michael Stocker describes this alienating effect as a kind of moral schizophrenia, where a wedge is driven between what morality says we should do and what we are really morally motivated to do.⁶⁰

We’re Mostly Not Public Benefactors

If you’re committed to the modern moral requirement of impartiality, what should you do in the face of this challenge? One way to answer it is to argue that the apparent conflict is actually just an illusion, and once we get clear on the moral requirement of impartiality, we’ll see that it leaves plenty of room for partial relationships like friendship. This was John Stuart Mill’s own preferred approach.

Mill recognized that people might be tempted to reject utilitarianism because the theory is simply too demanding: it seems to imply that we all have to be working full-time to promote happiness . But according to Mill, this view of the theory is simply mistaken, because only one person in a thousand has the exceptional power and influence to be a public benefactor. So, yes, utilitarianism can be demanding, but only very rarely: when you’re in the privileged position to make big differences in the lives of strangers through your actions, you must do so impartially, even if the cost to you is your partial interests and relationships. But for every one of these public benefactors, nine-hundred and ninety-nine of the rest of us can focus on our own lives and the people in it. That’s not too demanding at all.

Now, this answer may have been compelling in mid-nineteenth century England, but times have certainly changed. In 1971, while reflecting on our responsibility to help people suffering from a famine in East Bengal, Peter Singer observed: “From the moral point of view, the development of the world into a ‘global village’ has made an important, though still unrecognized, difference to our moral situation.”⁶¹ Singer’s aim is to get us all to do more to help suffering strangers in distant places, and he wants us to see how easy it is for us to do this. With the proliferation of responsible aid organizations putting experts in place in crisis situations, it’s easy for us to get our money into their hands so that they can do their good work. If this was true for Singer prior to the advent of the Internet age, it surely is true for us now that each one of us can be a public benefactor, channeling our resources at the click of a mouse to people who desperately need a vaccination, a mosquito net, or simple hydration to avoid imminent death. From an impartial point of view, these empirical facts about the world around us cannot be ignored.

Fitting Friendship into an Impartial Framework

A second way of dealing with the conflict between impartiality and friendship is to acknowledge the conflict, admit that it’s a problem, and then offer an impartial theory that accommodates friendship. Frank Jackson responds to the “nearest and dearest” objection by appealing to a “decision-theoretic” version of consequentialism, where he uses the example of crowd control at a soccer match.⁶²

Jackson asks us to imagine ourselves in the role of providing security for a large, sometimes rowdy crowd. In this situation, we can choose between two different security strategies: the ‘scatter’ plan, where we roam about the crowd doing as much good as possible for as many spectators as possible, or the ‘sector’ plan, where we are each responsible for a particular section of the crowd. Jackson recommends the latter.

By dividing this way, we won’t get in each other’s way, we will get to know particularly well our own section of the crowd, and we will be assured that no area is uncovered. We should remain flexible enough to divert our attention from our assigned sectors to another in case of emergency, but absent these emergencies, we can do the most good by sticking with our own sectors. For Jackson, this sector plan offers an analogy to friendship: we do the most good out in the world by focusing on our own nearest and dearest friends, rather than by hopping haphazardly from one emergency to another.

Yet there is a neatness to Jackson’s sector account of security that does not square with the moral problem at hand. What is being justified by Jackson’s security story is not friendship, but rather some even distribution of attention for everyone. This simply isn’t the way friendship works. Some people have lots of friends; others have relatively few, or even none. And a bigger problem for Jackson is the fact that people are not equally well-suited to help their friends when they’re in need. If you’re starving in a famine-stricken region of a third-world country, it’s likely that most of your friends are local to you, and enduring the same hardships. And while I really do cherish my friends, we’re all living in relative comfort, and it’s likely that most of them would be doing just fine right now if they had never met me. (Grim, but true.) In Jackson’s terms, I’m in a sector with an overabundance of security, and there are a great many sectors out there in desperate need of immediate attention with no security of their own.

Jackson recognizes this empirical fact and suggests that we leave the friends in our sector when we can make a “big” difference elsewhere, such as, for example, bringing about peace in the Middle East. But someone interested in adopting Jackson’s view surely should wonder why only the “big” differences matter, and even what counts as a “big” difference in the first place. If I give twenty dollars to Oxfam instead of going to dinner with a friend, and those twenty dollars help provide vaccinations to children at risk of contracting a life-threatening illness, surely that counts as a big difference in the lives of those vaccinated children, doesn’t it?

Another example of this second approach (modifying our moral theory to accommodate the partiality of friendship) has been proposed by Peter Railton.⁶³ According to Railton’s indirect strategy—what he calls “sophisticated consequentialism”—we shouldn’t aim to be impartial in our decision-making by trying to do the most good overall. We won’t be very successful—try as we might, we’re simply not ideal observers—and we’ll probably end up alienating a lot of people and creating a lot of unhappiness, including our own. Instead, the impartial demands of morality should act as a kind of screen for evaluating our decision-making procedures, rather than as a decision-making procedure itself.

By this view, what ultimately matters is the destination (whether I’ve done the most good), not the journey (how I arrive at the decision to act the way I did). At the end of the day, I need to have done the most impartial good that I can do. But when I’m going about my daily business, I shouldn’t be thinking about which action can do the most good—instead, I should make my day-to-day decisions in ways that are much less cold and calculating. Doing this, I’m apt to do more good in the long run than if I’m always consciously trying (and failing) to do my impartial best. Like some of the critics of consequentialism discussed earlier, Railton is worried about the alienating effect of impartiality—but if we don’t need to think like an ideal observer in our day-to-day decision-making, there’s no longer anything alienating about impartiality. As long as we arrive at living the sort of life that a good impartialist would endorse, for Railton and other indirect consequentialists, it really doesn’t matter how we get there.

One mystery here, however, is how we know we’re living good lives from an impartial point of view if we’re not actively trying to be impartial in our day-to-day decision-making. Railton wants us to get the best of consequentialism (doing the most good) without all of the alienating baggage that seems to come with the theory. But how exactly do I have any confidence that my partial decision-making procedures have led me to a good life from an impartial point of view? And even more mysterious is how exactly this indirect strategy squares with friendship, in the face of the empirical fact that there’s just so much good that could be done for so many people.

Approaches like Jackson’s and Railton’s are worth thinking about, but the problems they face show how tricky it can be to massage the moral requirements of impartiality to make it fit with the partiality of friendship. Square pegs just don’t fit round holes.

The facebook Solution: Friendship without Demands?

We’ve seen two kinds of solutions for reconciling the moral requirement of impartiality with the partiality of relationships like friendship. The first solution is to try to show that there’s really no conflict at all, because there’s really only so much we can do to bring about the most impartial good. This was Mill’s answer, and it doesn’t seem to fly in our current global village. The second solution is to adjust our impartial moral theories in order to accommodate friendship. There’s certainly lots of ways to go here, and we’ve only seen a few, but we’ve seen enough to realize how tricky this solution is.

This opens the door for a third approach: acknowledge the conflict between impartiality and friendship, but then adjust our understanding of friendship rather than our impartial moral theories. This brings our discussion back to the Facebook friendship: the friendship that makes no demands. The conflict between impartiality and friendship begins in the first place with trying to reconcile all of the time and attention we devote to our friends with the fact that our attention is always demanded elsewhere—there are always soup kitchens that need staffing, children that need mentoring, aid organizations that need funding. But if we can imagine friendship in a way that makes no demands on us, then friendship wouldn’t be in conflict with the moral requirement of impartiality. Facebook offers us a new way of thinking about friendship, and it might provide moral philosophers with a model for pursuing this third strategy.

This strategy suggested by Facebook resembles a suggestion offered by Shelly Kagan. He wants us to bite the bullet and accept the moral impermissibility of friendship, at least as we typically engage in it, as an unavoidable consequence of morality’s demand for impartiality. Morality requires us to be working full-time to promote the good—but that’s a very big undertaking! So, in directing all of our actions toward doing the most overall good, Kagan suggests that we “team up” with other folks committed to the same thing. Over time, these impartial teammates may start to seem a whole lot like friends. In fact, getting to know them well will probably only increase our efficiency in doing good together. Like the Facebook friendship, this teamwork friendship endorsed by Kagan doesn’t get in the way of doing the most good—in this respect, it also makes no demands.

In different ways, both models of friendship (Kagan’s and Facebook’s) are complementary to the modern moral requirement of impartiality. Kagan’s teamwork friendship is directly complementary—the friends he imagines directly help us do good. But the Facebook friendship is complementary in an indirect way. After all, it’s physically impossible for us to work non-stop—surely we need a mental and physical breather every now and then. And isn’t that how we use Facebook? We get on it, we tune out for a little while and poke around, and then we eventually get back to more serious stuff. Facebook doesn’t require any big investments of our time, finances, or other resources. So, for someone committed to doing the most overall good, we can still direct our energies toward promoting the good—but we can have our friendships on Facebook during those times when we’re recharging.

In just this way, the Facebook friendship seems to have an advantage over Kagan’s teamwork model. There’s something uncomfortably formal and stuffy about thinking of friends as teammates in maximizing the good, as Kagan imagines. The Facebook friendship remains fun and pleasantly diversionary, and really, shouldn’t friendship have this kind of appeal?

Unfortunately, there are some problems with this third strategy of solving the conflict between impartiality and friendship by appealing to the Facebook friendship, the friendship that makes no demands. One problem concerns how someone gets to be a Facebook friend in the first place. Almost without exception, every one of my 322 Facebook friends is someone I’ve known in some context other than Facebook. Among them are a wide range of acquaintances, including old schoolmates, family members, current and former students, colleagues, former professors, and people who I’ve been close friends with in the real world for years.

I’ve also had friend requests from perfect strangers, and I’ll confess that I’ve never known how to respond to these queries. On the one hand, saying ‘yes’ feels fraudulent and a bit weird. But on the other hand, there’s something unkind and maybe even cruel about saying ‘no’—as if I’m hurting this person’s feelings through my rejection. In the end, I usually say neither yes nor no and instead leave the request floating unanswered, a constant reminder in my inbox of how unusual the Facebook friendship can be. While some folks with huge friend tallies don’t seem to share my hang-up about this, the problem here is the fact that most Facebook friendships don’t begin on Facebook. So if the Facebook friendship is the only morally permissible sort of friendship for someone committed to the moral requirement of impartiality, it’s not clear that we can have this kind of friendship all by itself. Of course, some Facebook friendships are between folks with no connection outside of Facebook—but this is the exception and not the rule.

While we certainly spend time on Facebook interacting with friends, it’s very hard to see how that interaction can be characterized as “spending time together.” In a sense, the Facebook friendship is practical, given the kinds of social and political information-sharing that happens on Facebook. But it is much harder to find the emotional component in most cases, or to find the positive characteristics that Badhwar describes as integral to friendship. Surely, you might protest, there are all kinds of expressions of good will, affection, and the like on Facebook. But in most cases those positive feelings exist because of relationships that go far beyond Facebook. In most cases, in other words, the Facebook friendship is supplementary to a relationship that has been established and perhaps also goes on elsewhere.

This distinction is particularly important for thinking about the modern moral emphasis on impartiality, and on attempts to reconcile impartiality with friendship. The idea of the friendship that makes no demands might seem helpful at first, because it gives us an understanding of friendship that fits nicely with the demands of impartiality. But where we find the Facebook friendship to be a satisfactory representation of friendship, this is only so because that Facebook friendship is supplementary, and is accompanied by a more traditional relationship (and the operational costs of time, energy, and resources involved). Where the Facebook friendship is not supplementary, it’s very hard to see how it truly rises to the level of friendship, by any plausible definition of the word. In either case, anyone who takes the modern moral emphasis on impartiality seriously is left with the challenge of squaring that requirement with the partiality of relationships like friendship.