The concept of neutrality impacts ethical implications, suggesting some items warrant no normative demands.
We are called upon to favor good items and disfavor bad ones, but what about those that are neither good nor bad? Consider the state of a pebble lying unnoticed on a distant planet or a weevil not having a favorite color. If they possess neutral values, they would call upon us to react neutrally. Invoking the intuition that not everything makes normative demands, this paper defends a pluralistic view: among items that are neither good nor bad, some matter in a neutral way and others do not matter at all. The ethical implications of this view are highlighted and discussed.
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Andrés G. Garcia (2025) studied this question.
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