Moral Diversity and the Division of Moral Labor

Olivia Bailey (Co-Authored with Thi Nguyen)

From the Introduction:

Cervantes’ Don Quixote assures us: de todos ha de haber en el mundo – it takes all kinds to make a world. Our world is in fact peopled with individuals who vary widely in their tendencies of thought, concern, ambition, and affection– what we might more simply and inclusively call their temperaments. This variation includes variation in moral temperament, that is, variation in what individuals are disposed to judge, attend to, and care about when it comes to the general project of being good to each other. Some such variation is obviously regrettable from a moral point of view; we should not be glad that some people and not others are at all concerned to treat fellow humans respectfully. But is that true of all such variation? More particularly, are there good reasons to think that some kinds of interpersonal variation in moral temperament might be a morally good thing?

… Empirical research suggests that people regard (at least some kinds of) interpersonal moral diversity as uniquely undesirable, less good for all of us than diversity along non-moral dimensions is. Our ambition in this paper is not to definitively establish that this popular view is unjustified. Rather, our goal is to articulate a range of arguments to the effect that, from a moral point of view, interpersonal temperamental moral diversity is something to be welcomed, rather than regretted or merely tolerated.