Introduction

In Justice as Impartiality Brian Barry argues that impartiality is two-tiered. First-order impartiality ‘means not being motivated by private considerations. This is often cashed out by claiming that to be impartial you must not do for one person what you would not do for anyone else in a similar situation – where your being a friend or relative of one but not the other is excluded from counting as a relevant difference’. Second-order impartiality, which defines ‘justice as impartiality’, ‘calls for … principles and rules that are capable of forming the basis of free agreement among people seeking agreement in reasonable terms’ (Barry 1995: 11). In some contexts, second-order impartiality mandates first-order impartiality. Parents ought, for instance, to treat their children without favouritism. In other situations, second-order impartiality requires first-order partiality. The second-order principle ‘rules out the “the magic of the pronoun ‘my’” in this sense: I cannot say “I should rescue my wife and anybody else in a position to rescue one of two people should rescue my wife if she is one of the two”. But it does not rule out my saying: “Everybody should rescue his wife in such a situation.” For this does not put my wife in a specially privileged position at the second-order level’ (Barry 1995: 230).

In this chapter I shall mainly consider first-order impartiality. Specifically, I want to consider how non-moral motivations may simulate or mimic first-order impartiality (henceforward impartiality). First, however, I need to extend the notion of first-order impartiality.