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!
One curiosity, wondering what are your thoughts: since ethical dilemmas were mentioned, we could presumably assume that a world where some beings pull the trolley lever and others don't in [choose your favorite Trolley case] is better than a world where everyone makes the same judgments and same decisions. But, whether this is an acceptable state of affairs depends less on the value of diversity and more on whether there is a fact of the matter as to which moral decision is the right one, presumably corresponding to which moral theory is the best. If there were no fact of the matter concerning the pulling of the lever, it would seem to be a matter of moral indifference as to whether the lever is pulled and so we might then prefer diversity. But something sounds funny, at first, about saying "It would be better if there were a diversity of decisions made on this issue" when this is not a matter of indifference, because there is that lingering background anxiety about some decisions turning out ultimately to be morally wrong where it is an open question which is correct. Can I in good faith prefer the diversity there? Moral correctness ought to take priority it would seem.
ReplyDeleteOr would it be OK to set aside those kinds of cases involving potentially thick moral dilemmas? Would you be happy saying "there should be a diversity of paths towards happiness - within moral constraints"? We should allow for a diversity of ethical forms of life, more narrowly construed, where happiness is their end, so long as they do not violate moral standards; we can hear these standards as reflecting real prohibitions of our conduct, closer to duty, maybe, or maybe just of a more universal/categorical character, so as real facts about conduct, so long as they possess greater comprehensiveness and a kind of priority to any considerations of happiness? And perhaps, a stronger suggestion: so long as they do not violate potentially problematic moral standards connected to matters of genuine moral disagreement, we can prefer diversity?
Does it also follow, as a further question, that your position assumes a form of moral anti-realism and is incompatible with moral realisms?
The argument reflects a distinctly American framing of diversity, where difference is often understood primarily in terms of visible identity categories — race, sexuality, religion. This risks implying that people as such belong to fundamentally different kinds. Yet existentially speaking, all persons are already irreducibly different. Even siblings raised in the same family diverge in temperament, perception, and moral orientation. Diversity is not something produced by demographic variation; it is constitutive of human individuality itself.
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