First Name:
Walter
Last Name:
McGowan
Major Department:
Philosophy
Thesis Director:
Monique Lanoix
Date of Thesis:
May 2013
Determining what is right and wrong in any given situation can be difficult to begin with and becomes vastly more difficult when personal relationships are taken into account. Despite the desire in many ethical theories to yield universal and repeatable results in moral decisions, people tend to have intuitive partialities towards those with whom they are close. My goal is to justify these partialities insofar as they are motivated by what I am calling “impartial past experiences.” These impartial past experiences are the experiences one has shared with others which act as a sort of character witness for those in question. Naturally, people will have shared more impartial past experiences with those with whom they are close, and thus will be better able to judge for or against them. First, though, I will look at why impartial approaches to morality fail by examining R.M. Hare and John Rawls’ work as examples of two impartial approaches, and then looking at Marilyn Friedman’s objections that establish their theories as impractical. After this I am able to justify my system involving justified partiality motivated by impartial past experiences.