Given the conception of the impartial point of view as a 'God's eye' point of view, for example (Baier 1958), it seems questionable whether it is ever reasonable to expect a human moral agent to be able to occupy such a perspective.
The conception of impartiality that tends to be favored by deontologists avoids such implications by refusing to view impartial action simply as a matter of maximizing interests (or some other version of the impersonally determined good).
(We should note that this idea is not always clearly distinguished from the conception based on the impartial point of view; Smith 1976 [1759], for instance, seems to advance them both at once, in claiming that the ideal observer simply is the observer who occupies the impartial point of view).
In Political Liberalism, (Rawls 1993) he argues in a communitarian vein that his conception of the person as impartial citizen provides the best account of liberal-democratic political culture and that his political aim is only to work out the rules for consensus in political communities where people are willing to try for consensus.
Here, as with the conception of morality as defined by an impartial point of view, the phenomenon of morally admirable partiality proves a particularly difficult issue.
The utilitarian injunction to see things from the impartial standpoint is, if it means anything, an injunction to adopt the "absolute conception" of the world (1978 65 677).
These examples and data challenge canonical conceptions of knowledge as objective and of the knower as impartial, detached, and gender-neutral.
It is useful to contrast this conception of ren and the social arena in which it worked with the idea of jian ai or "impartial love" advocated by the Mohists who as early as the fifth century BCE posed the greatest intellectual challenge to Confucius' thought.
What must be pointed out about such a conception of morality, for our purposes, is that any advantage it has over the conception of morality as an impartial point of view presumably arises from the fact that the ideal observer is not completely defined in terms of impartiality.
