Impartiality, Emotion and Judgment: The Normative Validity of Situated Reasoning

• In Event: Practicing Democracy, Training Citizens

Abstract

As situated reasoners with a range of identities and commitments, how do we approach impartiality, and build institutional structures that can aid us in making impartial judgments? Most theories take as their foundation the idea that impartiality requires stripping away the distinctive features of one’s own perspective to arrive at a neutral standpoint. However, I argue, drawing on Arendt’s work on judgment and engaging with realist methodologies in political theory, that impartiality is more effectively approached via an additive and collaborative process. By this I mean that impartiality involves reflecting on one’s standpoint and its particularities with others so as to collectively develop a shared object of judgment out of partial individual perspectives. We can more closely approach impartiality by taking our situatedness seriously rather than trying to minimize it directly in ways that may simply make us less aware of our own biases. One feature of this which is understated even in many Arendtian approaches is the foundational role that emotions play in constructing shared judgments as well as providing alternate structures of justification.

Scholars such as Nedelsky have addressed some of the concerns that a reductive notion of impartiality can lead to, such as automatically assuming that reasoners who are not white or male, or who may have specific knowledge of a scenario are “biased,” while neglecting that being white or male themselves constitute standpoints. She offers the example of how people who have faced sexual harassment/assault are often excluded from campus tribunals formed to deal with claims of this sort because they are seen as biased towards victims. This discounts how they are also more likely to have practical expertise in understanding cases of sexual harassment, rather than relying on pervasive myths that reinforce the authority of the perpetrator. Indeed, being more emotionally attuned to a set of responses may itself count as relevant expertise. Exclusion of particularity as bias reinforces oppressive structures and excludes meaningful expertise by characterizing emotion as the other of reason, and not itself part of our reasoning processes.

My work provides a novel argument in two ways. First, it integrates methodological considerations from realist theory, arguing that impartiality should be approached as a practical problem of reasoning together, and that we can better approach it by being attuned to how we actually reason and deliberate; the problem of impartiality is one best characterized (in terms borrowed from realists such as Levy) as “getting from here to there.” Second, it explicitly offers an account of how we can take seriously both individual and collective emotions as important and even foundational tools for reasoning, providing a mechanism to show how the practical exercise of reflection on emotions (including seemingly unreasonable ones) can provide alternatives to a vision of impartiality which often inadvertently reinforces oppressive norms.

Author

• Aberdeen Berry