Phil239 when forming judgments and carrying out sentences . This is the role that court judges must play in society . Similarly , when regular people make day-to-day moral judgments , they must also sometimes take on the mantle of an impartial benevolent spectator , whether it be a teacher grading work ignoring the race or gender of a student or a referee in a football match remaining unbiased to arbitrary characteristics of the players . The importance of the impartial spectator is to uphold the idea that arbitrary differences like race or gender have no weighing when making moral judgments . To claim that different groups of people have different moral worth based on unrelated differences is a slippery slope that could lead to tyranny . The obvious example of where partiality in the wrong places has led to tyranny can be seen in Hitler ’ s Germany . By ascribing significantly less moral worth to Jews , black people , Roma people , homosexuals and disabled people , Hitler tried to justify the moral genocide of these people claiming that they were somehow less human based on justifications that had absolutely no relation to the question of humanity . It is upon reflection of the tyrannous injustices of the past that we can recognise the need for benevolent impartiality that disregards arbitrary differences in humans . However , when observed more closely , we are able to see how impartiality is not necessarily the shining beacon of justice that one would hope . Actually , impartiality in many cases is impractical when conducting our day-to-day private lives and that partiality and selfishness is as important a part of human conduct as impartiality .
It seems the case that we can intuitively rely on impartiality to live our lives in a just and virtuous fashion , that in order to be moral all we need to do is make sure we are impartial . In the abstract , in institutions and in systems impartiality works to preserve morality , for example in the judicial system or in the workplace or in sporting events it preserves an element of fairness . However , when we observe the principle of impartiality on a person-to-person basis the ideal starts to fall apart . John Cottingham in his paper “ Ethics
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