This will colour my attitude to others in obvious ways. If others differ from me in the moral arena, I shall tend to regard them as mistaken or flawed rather than as having an equally valid take on life, and this in turn will tend to generate conflict, resentment, suspicion, rejection rather than tolerance, accommodation, receptivity, compromise. But if I am a pluralist I will accept or welcome different moral conceptions rather than feeling threatened by them. I shall view life as enriched rather than corrupted by the simultaneous existence of a wide variety of moral and political outlooks provided always, of course, that the minimum indispensable requirements of any humane morality are respected. My attitude to and relations with those who differ from me will be analogously transformed.
Pluralism turns a missionary into an explorer.
Just as biologists celebrate biodiversity, so pluralists find a world of ethical diversity richer than a world dominated by ethical conformism. All this may sound very banal and commonplace. Proverbially, after all, it takes all sorts to make a world. But this saying refers to varieties of taste and aptitude rather than to variety in life-forming moral values. Most people and most ideological groups behave as if they and they alone are in the right, not as if they share the world with those whose values and traditions, though very different, may be no less valid.