concerning three major questions: whether personal interests can play a role in determining oral duties, whether it is possible to adopt a standpoint for moral deliberation that is dependent of ourselves; and whether we can take into account personal relationships in assessing moral duties. Most of the impartiality debate, and certainly its analysis of special duties, concerns the last issue. In one rather simple sense of the term, partialists seek to morally justify these relationships(to family members, community, or country) while impartialists downplay them Some of the differences between partialists and impartialists have been narrowed through the notion of orders(or levels)of impartiality. Under this view, one can remain impartial as an individual while accepting the morality of special duties long as one can justify those duties from an independent moral perspective such that all individuals owe those special duties to all persons in that special relationship to them. In other words special duties are not violations of the principle of impartiality because that principle means treating all like cases alike, not simply all cases alike. This sort of reason undergirds the very impartialist defense of special duties put forth years ago by Pettit and Goodin, arguing that such duties derive from special responsibilities that an agent can have for a certain state of affairs. By virtue of those responsibilities, only certain agents(rather than all agents) have the duties, but others with those responsibilities(to a different state of affairs involving a different beneficiary )also have special duties. An impartialist could thus defend an individual s patriotic ties if he were convinced that there were a moral basis impersonal morality"in Is PATRIOTISM A VIRTUE? (Lindley Lecture, University of Kansas 1984 Lawrence C Becker, Impartiality and Ethical Theory, 101 ETHICS 698(1991) Pettit Goodin, supra note 149 concerning three major questions: whether personal interests can play a role in determining moral duties; whether it is possible to adopt a standpoint for moral deliberation that is independent of ourselves; and whether we can take into account personal relationships in assessing moral duties.17 Most of the impartiality debate, and certainly its analysis of special duties, concerns the last issue. In one rather simple sense of the term, partialists seek to morally justify these relationships (to family members, community, or country), while impartialists downplay them. Some of the differences between partialists and impartialists have been narrowed through the notion of orders (or levels) of impartiality. Under this view, one can remain impartial as an individual while accepting the morality of special duties long as one can justify those duties from an independent moral perspective such that all individuals owe those special duties to all persons in that special relationship to them. In other words, special duties are not violations of the principle of impartiality because that principle means treating all like cases alike, not simply all cases alike. This sort of reason undergirds the very impartialist defense of special duties put forth years ago by Pettit and Goodin, arguing that such duties derive from special responsibilities that an agent can have for a certain state of affairs. By virtue of those responsibilities, only certain agents (rather than all agents) have the duties; but others with those responsibilities (to a different state of affairs involving a different beneficiary) also have special duties.18 An impartialist could thus defend an individual’s patriotic ties if he were convinced that there were a moral basis impersonal morality” in IS PATRIOTISM A VIRTUE? (Lindley Lecture, University of Kansas, 1984). 17 Lawrence C. Becker, Impartiality and Ethical Theory, 101 ETHICS 698 (1991). 18 Pettit & Goodin, supra note 14