As I began to argue earlier this year and elaborated on last week, the growth of knowledge has positive expected moral value because it tends toward moral self-improvement.
Humans produce a lot of knowledge. The total wealth of human-produced knowledge is astonishingly vast, as indicated by the contents of the internet, or the Library of Congress, or Wall Street, or ChatGPT’s training data. This suggests that the average (although not necessarily the median) person produces quite a lot of knowledge.
Some people produce far more knowledge than others. For example, the occasional genius makes some scientific, technological, or entrepreneurial breakthrough that is so significant it changes the world in widely noticeable ways. But even the vast majority of ordinary people create knowledge. By participating in the market-place, for instance, most people create a lot of economically valuable specific local knowledge through the price system, as the Nobel Prize winning economist Friedrich Hayek explains in his classic articles “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945) and “Competition as a Discovery Procedure” (1968).
Therefore, almost all humans have considerable positive expected moral value as knowledge-producing entities. This even, or perhaps especially, applies to newborn babies, who are barely producing any knowledge now but are likely to one day become effective knowledge producers if nurtured.
Of course, by this standard, some people are worthless or less than worthless. It is possible to commit such evil acts, or make such giant mistakes, that your net effect on knowledge production becomes neutral or negative. For example, if your actions contribute significantly to a genocide, the destructive effects of your actions on the world’s knowledge content likely outweigh the creative effects, despite your market participation and other knowledge-creating activities. This is because the people murdered in a genocide generally had a lot of knowledge of their own that is wiped out with them, and they generally were contributors to knowledge-creating institutions and processes (such as the market economy as noted above) that will be lessor for their absence.
This knowledge-based source of human moral value is philosophically non-exclusive: It is not a refutation of most other moral frameworks. It plays well with others. If you have a sound argument that pleasure, or happiness, or worship, are reasons to morally value human life, then your argument probably still stands, and you can include the knowledge argument in your moral calculations without abandoning your other moral arguments. But if you have no other sound arguments for human moral worth, then at least there is this one.