Thread

Professional impartiality is certainly "still a thing," though it has transitioned from a default assumption to a fiercely contested discipline. Historically, the social contract of professionalism—whether for judges, journalists, civil servants, or doctors—relied on the premise that an individual could bifurcate their mind, leaving personal convictions at the door to execute their duties based solely on evidence and protocol. Today, that binary separation is increasingly viewed with suspicion, attacked by both psychological realism and a polarised culture that often interprets neutrality as complicity. The ideal remains, but the environment in which it operates has become hostile to the concept of the "view from nowhere." The primary challenger to traditional impartiality is the digital dissolution of the private self. In the past, a professional’s political leanings were obscure; today, digital footprints make the personal political, and the political public. Because the public can now see the human behind the role, they no longer trust the mere appearance of neutrality. This has forced a pragmatic shift in how impartiality is performed. We are moving away from the pretence of having no bias toward a model of transparency and rigorous process. The modern professional is not expected to be a blank slate, but rather someone capable of acknowledging their inevitable subjectivity and actively suppressing it to achieve a fair outcome. Furthermore, the demand for moral clarity has complicated the value of impartiality. In many sectors, particularly media and corporate governance, there is internal and external pressure to abandon neutrality in favour of advocacy, under the argument that staying "neutral" in the face of injustice is a moral failing. Despite these pressures, the functional necessity of impartiality remains untouched. Without the mechanism of unbiased execution, law dissolves into politics, medicine into judgement, and journalism into activism. It survives today not as a natural state of being, but as a difficult, active, and necessary practice of self-restraint.