agreement. Men’s natural capacity for sympathy suitably generalized pro-
vides the perspective from which they can reach an understanding on a
common conception of justice.
Thus we arrive at the following view. A rational
and impartial sympa-
thetic spectator is a person who takes up a general perspective: he as-
sumes a position where his own interests are not at stake and he possesses
all the requisite information and powers of reasoning. So situated he is
equally sympathetic to the desires and satisfactions of everyone affected
by the social system. Responding to the interests of each person in the
same way, an impartial spectator gives free reign to his capacity for
sympathetic identification by viewing each person’s situation as it affects
that person. Thus he imagines himself in the place of each person in turn,
and when he has done this for everyone, the strength of his approval is
determined by the balance of satisfactions to which he has sympatheti-
cally responded. When he has made the rounds
of all the affected parties,
so to speak, his approval expresses the total result. Sympathetically imag-
ined pains cancel out sympathetically imagined pleasures, and the final
intensity of approval corresponds to the net sum of positive feeling.
It is instructive to note a contrast between the features of the sympa-
thetic spectator and the conditions defining the original position. The
elements of the sympathetic spectator definition, impartiality, possession
of relevant knowledge, and powers of imaginative identification, are to
assure the complete and accurate response of natural sympathy. Imparti-
ality prevents distortions of bias and self-interest; knowledge and the
capacity for identification guarantee that the aspirations of others will be
accurately appreciated. We can understand the point of the definition once
we see that its parts are designed to give free
scope to the operation of
fellow feeling. In the original position, by contrast, the parties are mutu-
ally disinterested rather than sympathetic; but lacking knowledge of their
natural assets or social situation, they are forced to view their arrange-
ments in a general way. In the one case perfect knowledge and sympa-
thetic identification result in a correct estimate of the net sum of satisfac-
tion; in the other, mutual disinterestedness subject to a veil of ignorance
leads to the two principles of justice.
Now, as
I have mentioned, there is a sense in which classical utilitari-
anism fails to take seriously the distinction between persons (§5). The
principle of rational choice for one man is taken as the principle of social
choice as well. How does this view come about? It is the consequence, as
we can now see, of wanting to give a deductive basis to an ideal observer
definition of right, and of presuming that men’s natural capacity for
163
30. Classical Utilitarianism
sympathy provides the only means by which their moral judgments can
be brought into agreement. The approvals
of the impartial sympathetic
spectator are adopted as the standard of justice, and this results in imper-
sonality, in the conflation of all desires into one system of desire.
37
From the standpoint of justice as fairness there is no reason why the
persons in the original position would agree to the approvals of an impar-
tial sympathetic spectator as the standard of justice. This agreement has
all the drawbacks of the classical principle of utility to which it is equiva-
lent. If, however, the parties are conceived as perfect altruists, that is, as
persons whose desires conform to the approvals of such a spectator, then
the classical principle would, of course, be adopted.
The greater net
balance of happiness with which to sympathize, the more a perfect altru-
ist achieves his desire. Thus we arrive at the unexpected conclusion that
while the average principle of utility is the ethic of a single rational
37. The most explicit and developed statement of this view I know of is that found in C. I. Lewis,
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
