We are partial to people with whom we share special relationships--if someone is your child, parent, or friend, you wouldn't treat them as you would a stranger. But is partiality justified, and if so, why? Partiality presents a theory of the reasons supporting special treatment within special relationships and explores the vexing problem of how we might reconcile the moral value of these relationships with competing claims of impartial morality. Simon Keller explains that in order to understand why we give special treatment to our family and friends, we need to understand how people come to matter in their own rights. Keller first presents two main accounts of partiality: the projects view, on which reasons of partiality arise from the place that people take within our lives and our commitments, and the relationships view, on which relationships themselves contain fundamental value or reason-giving force. Keller then argues that neither view is satisfactory because neither captures the experience of acting well within special relationships. Instead, Keller defends the individuals view, on which reasons of partiality arise from the value of the individuals with whom our relationships are shared. He defends this view by saying that we must accept that two people, whether friend or stranger, can have the same value, even as their value makes different demands upon people with whom they share different relationships. Keller explores the implications of this claim within a wider understanding of morality and our relationships with groups, institutions, and countries.

Derived from Thomas Nagel's Locke Lectures, Equality and Partiality proposes a nonutopian account of political legitimacy, based on the need to accommodate both personal and impersonal motives in any credible moral theory, and therefore in any political theory with a moral foundation. Within each individual, Nagel believes, there is a division between two standpoints, the personal and the impersonal. Without the impersonal standpoint, there would be no morality, only the clash, compromise, and occasional convergence of individual perspectives. It is because a human being does not occupy only his own point of view that each of us is susceptible to the claims of others through private and public morality. Political systems, to be legitimate, must achieve an integration of these two standpoints within the individual. These ideas are applied to specific problems such as social and economic inequality, toleration, international justice, and the public support of culture. Nagel points to the problem of balancing equality and partiality as the most important issue with which political theorists are now faced.

Partiality and Impartiality in African Philosophy fills the lacuna in African philosophy literature on the inherent tension between requirements of partiality (favoritism) and impartiality (equality). Motsamai Molefe deploys two strategies to philosophically resolve the tension between partiality and impartiality. The first strategy involves applying the moral theories of Kwasi Wiredu, Thaddeus Metz, and Kwame Gyekye to the problem. Finding their views useful in some ways and seriously limited in others, Molefe turns to the second strategy in which he invokes the salient normative concept of personhood in African cultures. Molefe argues that the concept of personhood adjoins theories of human dignity and moral perfection (virtue). The major insight that emerges is a robust ethical theory qua personhood that accommodates both partiality and impartiality. He grounds requirements of impartiality on human dignity, which operates largely as a macro-ethical concept that normatively informs the character of our social institutions (politics). Politics is characterized by fairness, equality, and impartiality. Partiality (the agent-and-other-centred forms of it) is directly connected with the agent’s chief moral duty to achieve her own virtue (moral perfection), which operates as a micro-ethical concept. These two kinds of moral partialism, self-favoritism and close ties such as family, are justified by appeal to the project's view, instead of the individuals-and-relationships view typically invoked to justify moral partiality in the literature.

This volume gathers essays from leading scholars to discuss partiality in ethics. The chapters examine the virtuous and vicious ways in which we relate to those close to us. There has long been a puzzle in ethics concerning the balance between our general moral obligations to everyone and our specific moral obligations to a smaller subset of people: our family, our nation, and our friends. There has been longstanding tension between the moral intuition that equality entails that we have the same moral duties to everyone and the moral intuition that special obligations entail that we have much greater duties to those close to us. The chapters in this volume discuss varying perspectives on partiality within a wide range of relationships. Section 1 offers overarching visions of partiality. Section 2 examines how roles and relationships might shape partiality. Section 3 focuses on the potential moral dangers and pitfalls of partiality. Finally, Section 4 looks at specific applications of partiality expressed as our loyalty to country, religion, sports teams, and employers. Virtuous and Vicious Expressions of Partiality will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in ethics, social and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion.

Partiality and Justice in Nursing Care examines the conflicting normative claims of partiality and impartiality in nursing care, looking in depth at how to reconcile reasonable concerns for one particular patient with equally important concerns for the maximisation of health-related welfare for all with relevant nursing-care needs, in a resource-limited setting. Drawing on moral philosophy, this book explores how discussions of partiality and impartiality in moral philosophy can have relevance to the professional context of clinical nursing care as well as in nursing ethics in general. It develops a framework for normative nursing ethics that incorporates a notion of permissible partiality, and specifies which concerns an ethics of nursing care should entail when balancing partialist and impartialist concerns. At the same time, Nordhaug argues that this partiality must also be constrained by both principled and context-sensitive assessments of patients’ needs, as well as of the role-relative deontological restriction of minimising harm, something that could be mitigated by institutional and organisational arrangements. This thought-provoking volume is an important contribution to nursing ethics and philosophy.

Situated within the framework of Confucian family-oriented ethics, this book explores the issue of familial partiality and specifically discusses whether it is morally praiseworthy to love one’s family partially. In reviewing the tension between familial partiality and egalitarian impartiality from different perspectives while also drawing on binary metrics to understand the issue – that is, the weak and strong sense of familial partiality in Confucian moral theory – the author carefully discusses the efficacy of three major arguments to justify moral partiality. It is concluded that the tree argument fails to justify moral partiality in Confucianism, the evolutionary argument only justifies moral partiality in the weak sense that we should devote more resources to our family, and the care argument fails to justify moral partiality in the strong sense that family takes priority in any case even at the expense of the principle of justice. Seeking to address the quandary, the author advances an alternative argument based on Thomas Aquinas’ theory of love to interpret Confucian view of partial relationships, holding that partial treatment is assumed in partial relationships. The title will appeal to scholars and students interested in Confucianism, Chinese philosophy, moral philosophy, and comparative philosophy.

The Scope and Limits of Partiality takes as its starting point the fact that we demonstrate partiality toward those to whom we stand in intimate relationships, a fact which presents both theoretical and practical challenges. At the theoretical level, Diane Jeske argues that we have fundamental reasons to care for our intimates, but that that fact alone does not justify our practices of partiality. This is because we also have fundamental reasons to care for persons in need, be they intimates or strangers. At the normative level, she argues that our intimate relationships, be they to other persons or to non-human animals, add great value to our lives, and that public policy ought to acknowledge the great diversity of intimate relationships rather than emphasizing romance and marriage in the way that it does. In the theoretical half of the book, Jeske defends the 'relationships view' of reasons of intimacy against its primary competitors. First, Jeske argues that consequentialist attempts to accommodate partiality fail to address the fundamental issues regarding our reasons to care for intimates. Second, she argues that the main non-consequentialist alternatives to the relationships view - the 'projects view' and the 'individuals view' - fail to present compelling cases against the relationships view. In the normative half of the book, Jeske offers a detailed picture of the intimate relationship of friendship, arguing against views that over intellectualize or romanticize friendship by drawing upon her own lived experience of friendship. She then considers our relationships to our companion dogs and cats, showing that these relationships are unique sites for intimacy, and, thus, for value. Finally, she turns to consider how intimacy is treated in the public sphere, focusing on the special cultural and legal attention given to marriage, and to how we ought to approach our intimate relationships and our reasons to care for our intimates in a highly imperfect world where so many people are deprived of the basic necessities of life. The Scope and Limits of Partiality presents a comprehensive account of intimacy and partiality in both theory and reality.