Moral diversity, Olivia Bailey and Thi Nguyen say (in a draft paper shared with Myisha Cherry's Emotion and Society Lab), is valuable. It's good that people have different ethical personalities, opinions, and concerns. (Within reason: Nazis not welcome.)
Why? Their reasons are instrumental. Society benefits when people care intensely about different things. This allows us collectively to achieve a wide range of goals -- curing cancer, helping the homeless, protesting unjust government. Society also benefits if some people explore the ethical possibility space, developing unusual moral visions, most of which will be mistaken but a few of which might eventually be recognized as genuine moral advances (think of the first slavery abolitionists). And individuals benefit from the liberty to adopt moral priorities that fit their skills and temperaments: Some people thrive in battle, others in caregiving, others in solitary work.
But is moral diversity also intrinsically valuable -- that is, valuable for its own sake, independent of these good consequences? I think so. I think so because diversity in general is intrinsically valuable, and there's no good reason to treat moral diversity as an exception.
How does one argumentatively establish the intrinsic value of diversity? The only way I know is to reveal, through thought experiment, that you already implicitly accept it -- and then to ward off objections.
Bailey and Nguyen briefly cite Alexander Nehamas on diversity of aesthetic opinion. Nehamas writes:
I think a world where everyone liked, or loved, the same things would be a desperate, desolate world -- as devoid of pleasure and interest as the most frightful dystopia of those who believe (quite wrongly) that the popular media are inevitably producing a depressingly, disconsolately uniform world culture. And although I say this with serious discomfort, a world in which everyone liked Shakespeare, or Titian, or Bach for the same reasons -- if such a world were possible -- appears to me no better than a world where everyone tuned in to Baywatch or listened to the worst pop music at the same time (Nehamas 2002, p. 58-59).
Why is aesthetic diversity valuable, according to Nehamas? Because style and taste require originality and are bound up with what is distinctive about your life, interests, and sensibility. Without distinctiveness, style and taste collapse -- an aesthetic disaster.
Should we say, then, that diversity, including moral diversity, is valuable aesthetically? That its value lies primarily in its beauty, in its capacity to inspire awe, or some other aesthetic feature? Indeed, diversity is beautiful and awesome (imagine the world without it!) but I don't think this exhausts its intrinsic value. Aesthetic value requires a spectator, at least a notional one, whose appreciation is the point. The intrinsic value of diversity is not, or not primarily, mediated through the hypothetical reaction of an aesthetic spectator.
My favorite approach to thinking about intrinsic value is the Distant Planet Thought Experiment. Imagine a planet on the far side of the galaxy, blocked from view by the galactic core, a planet we'll never see or interact with. What would we hope for on this planet, for its own sake, independent of any potential value for us?
Would you hope that it's a sterile rock, completely devoid of life? I think not. If you do think a lifeless rock would be best, I have no argument against you. For me this is a starting place, a bedrock judgment, which I expect most readers will share.
Suppose, then, that you agree a planet with life would be intrinsically better than one without. Would you hope that its life consists entirely of microbes? Or would you hope that it teems with diverse life: reefs and rainforests, beetles and bats, squid and bees and ferns and foxes -- or rather, not to duplicate Earth too closely, their alien analogues, translated into a different key? I think you'll hope that the planet teems with diverse life.
Would you hope that no life on this planet has humanlike behavioral sophistication -- language, long-term planning, complex social coordination? Would you hope that nothing there could contemplate the meaning of life, the origin of the stars, or its own ancient history? Would you hope that nothing there could create art, or engage in athletic competition, or invent complex games and tricks and jokes? I invite you to join me in thinking otherwise. The planet would be better if it included some beings with that richness of thought and activity.
Would you hope for uniformity of intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical opinion -- that everyone shares the same values and ideas? Or would you hope for diversity? I think you'll join me in thinking that the world would be better, better for its own sake, if it were diverse rather than uniform. Different entities would have different skills, preferences, passions, and ideas. They'll fight and disagree (not genocidally, I hope), sometimes value their differences, sometimes dismiss others as completely wrongheaded, sometimes cluster into shared projects, sometimes collaborate across deep disagreement, sometimes be drawn to opposites, sometimes feel kinship with the like-minded, play within and across divides, pursue an enormous variety of projects, explore a vast space of possible forms of life.
That is what I hope for on this distant planet -- not for instrumental reasons (not, for example, because it will maximize happiness), and not merely because it would strike a hypothetical spectator as beautiful and awesome (though it should). Rather, just because it would be valuable for its own sake. An empty void has little or no value; a rich plurality of forms of existence has immense value, no further justification required.
I have not argued for this. I have only stated it vividly, hoping that you already accept it.
Is ethical opinion an exception? Should we prefer unity and conformity in ethics, even while welcoming diversity elsewhere? I think not, for two reasons.
First, ethics is open-textured, indeterminate, and full of tragic dilemmas. Often there is no one decisively best answer on which everyone should converge. Diversity within at least the bounds of reasonable disagreement should be permitted.
Second, ethical values are inseparable from our other values and ways of life. A philosophy professor, a civil rights lawyer, a professional athlete, and a farmer will value different things. There is, I think, no point in attempting to cleanly separate their differing values into distinct types, some of which are permitted to vary and others of which may not. The ethical, prudential, epistemic, and aesthetic blur together. These distinctions are not as clean as philosophers often assume. Normativity is a mush.
Oh, some of you disagree? Good!
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