The use of a simple 50%-50% box score of decisions for parents and districts, respectively, is a false measure of the impartiality of hearing officers under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This analysis canvasses relevant structural factors that the stakeholders, the mass media, and the professional literature have failed to recognize both generally and systematically. T...

disinterested level. It is only when we make general judgements of how anyone ought to be treated that we can begin to speak of moral approval and disapproval. It is in this specific area, famously symbolized by Smith’s (1937 [1759]) “impartial spectator,” that humans seem to go radically further than other primates. There is no doubt that this distinction touches on something that we all recog...

Course allocation is one of the most complex issues facing any university, due to the sensitive nature of deciding which subset of students should be granted seats in highly-popular (market-scarce) courses. In recent years, researchers have proposed numerous solutions, using techniques in integer programming, combinatorial auction design, and matching theory. In this paper, we present a four-pa...

Objectivity has long been contentious in American journalism. Many practitioners call it essential to a news organization’s credibility. Critics, however, hold objectivity is impossible and urge reporters simply to reveal their biases. For educators, teaching objectivity is challenging. Some, seeking a middle ground, instead urge fairness and balance, or counsel “impartiality.” Even such approa...

It is a truism in mainstream academic debates and practical trainings that mediators’ impartiality is an essential element of successful peace mediation. In order to gain trust from negotiating parties who are carrying out adversarial bargaining, the traditional assumption suggests that mediating bodies must remain “impartial and unbiased, ideally unconnected” to any of the direct participants....

The two concepts — human rights and capabilities — go well with each other, so long as we do not try to subsume either concept entirely within the territory of the other. There are many human rights that can be seen as rights to particular capabilities. However, human rights to important process freedoms cannot be adequately analysed within the capability framework. Furthermore, both human righ...

Traditional approaches to bioethics, that privilege impartiality and objectivity and that focus primarily on moral reasoning, are relatively silent on the moral habitability of healthcare environments. Nurses and others in "the trenches" of healthcare are increasingly voicing the need to address everyday ethical issues, interdisciplinary tensions, and systemic concerns, in addition to the ethic...

In March 2008, the German Federal Constitutional Court (GFCC) has passed an important, even though preliminary, decision concerning data retention. The GFCC’s decision accepts the storage of data, but greatly restricts their use to serious offenses like murder and organized crime. From an ethical point of view, it is particularly interesting to look at the justification given by the GFCC, which...

Abstract Theories connecting meritocracy and democratic stability are heavily understudied, there few attempts to empirically disentangle the potential mechanisms. This article proposes a novel explanation, emphasizing that bureaucratic impartiality effectiveness provide separate shields stabilize democracies. Impartiality protects opposition from unlawful discrimination, which raises support f...