Is Morality Subjective?
Leslie Allan
Published online: 16 December 2015
Copyright © 2015 Leslie Allan
Subjectivists claim that the absence of a theological or metaphysical grounding to moral
judgements renders them all as simply statements about our subjective wants and
preferences. Leslie Allan argues that the subjectivists’ case rests on a misunderstanding
of the nature of moral objectivity. He presents the view that subjectivists mistakenly
counterpoise the ideal of moral objectivity with the expression of individual preferences.
Being objective in moral deliberation, Allan argues, should be regarded instead as the
antithesis of parochial and biased reasoning. This account of moral objectivity, he
concludes, makes sense of a long-standing universalist tradition in moral philosophy.
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Leslie Allan
Is Morality Subjective?
1. Moral Reasons and Objectivity
All too often, I come across the view that when we make moral judgments, we are
simply expressing our personal likes and dislikes. Saying ‘Hitler was bad’, on this view, is the
same as saying, ‘I don’t like Hitler’. For people who think morality is subjective, aspiring to
objectivity in ethics is a chimera, to be avoided as a remnant of a bygone era of superstition
and nonsense. To some extent, this approach to moral judgements seems unavoidable,
given the demise of religious world-views and other superstitious beliefs since the
Enlightenment.
However, I think this radical subjectivism is mistaken. Moral discourse, at its core, is
about giving objective reasons for our judgements about how we act towards one another
and other sentient creatures. When I refer to objectivity as essential to ethics, I am not
speaking about some mind- or human-independent metaphysical realm that imbues things
and acts with value and obligatoryness. On the contrary, objective reasons in the field of
ethics are juxtaposed with reasons that are partisan or biased to favour one individual or
group.
Consider this scenario. You find out that your neighbour is secretly bribing his local
politician in order to get favourable treatment and you decide to challenge his behaviour.
He responds, ‘Oh yes! It’s the right thing for me to do.’ When you ask him how he came to
the conclusion that bribery is morally permissible, he answers, ‘Oh, because it helps me and
my family get permission to build a bigger house.’ Quite rightly, you and anyone else
listening would not regard his answer as a moral reason at all. In fact, we would consider it
as its antithesis; a selfish and immoral reason. By its very nature, we expect a moral reason
to be impartial, without appeal to the speaker’s peculiar interests or the interests of their
favoured group.
Consider another case in which a person beats a stranger on a public roadway. When
asked what moral justification the abuser had for beating her victim, she offers that she was
bored. Naturally, we take this as self-serving and the converse of a moral justification. The
important point that these two examples illustrate is that the immoral nature of the two
reasons given is not contingent. It’s not the case that under some circumstances, we think
the reasons given could be moral reasons. Rightly, we think the two people in these
scenarios are conceptually confused about what constitutes a moral reason for action. This
requirement for impartiality is built into the very concept of morality.
2. Moral Objectivity as Impartiality
Unfortunately, it is this requirement for impartiality that often gets confused. The
requirement for objectivity in ethics gets conceptually confused with the need for some
metaphysical mind- or human independent realm. Objectivity in ethics should not be
contrasted with subjectivity in the sense of being grounded in people’s attitudes and
preferences. Objectivity in ethics is more correctly contrasted with subjectivity in the sense
of being partisan, selfish and parochial.
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Is Morality Subjective?
Ethicists of different metaphysical persuasions have tried to satisfy this necessary
requirement for objectivity by mistakenly dressing up moral language as if it is about some
human-independent realm. Theists identify the good and the right with God’s preferences
and commands. Intuitionists conflate moral attributes with some mysterious realm of
non-natural properties and transcendent rules. Neo-Aristotelians and Natural Law theorists
rely on a dubious teleology of life’s evolution on earth. Kantian Rationalists try to derive
moral rules from the demands of pure reason.
When all of these attempts to ground morality in a human-independent
metaphysical realm fail, the subjectivists claim victory for treating moral judgements as of
the same type as any other kind of personal preference. But the subjectivists suffer from the
same misconceptions about moral judgements as their metaphysical opponents. Like the
metaphysicians, they think moral objectivity must be grounded in a mysterious
metaphysical realm or not at all. They give up on the requirement of objectivity all too
hastily.
There is a strong philosophical tradition in incorporating this notion of impartiality as
essential to the nature of ethics. Immanuel Kant tried to capture this idea of universality in
his categorical imperative; the notion that a moral rule necessarily must be such that it is
willed for all. R. M. Hare built it into his theory of universal Prescriptivism; the idea that
moral judgements are prescriptions that we want to apply to everyone. Henry Sidgwick,
J. S. Mill and later Utilitarians encapsulated moral objectivity with their principle of
impartiality, translated as the requirement for the equal consideration of all interests.
3. Moral Judgements versus Non-moral Preferences
By treating all moral judgements as statements about subjective attitudes and
preferences, subjectivists struggle to make the distinction each of us recognizes naturally;
the distinction between moral judgements and non-moral preferences. They fail to
distinguish moral imperatives from prudential considerations, the demands of social
etiquette and other non-moral norms.
To illustrate what I mean, consider this scenario. After eating a friend’s cake that she
so lovingly baked, your partner asks whether you liked it. You opine, ‘Mary’s cake is good.’
Your friend Mary also works voluntarily at the local soup kitchen serving the homeless.
Commending Mary’s volunteer work, you tell your friends, ‘Mary’s volunteer work is good.’
We quite naturally regard the former use of the word ‘good’, as it applies to Mary’s cake, as
a non-moral use. Conversely, we understand the latter use, as it applies to altruistic
volunteer work, as a moral use of the word ‘good’.
To account for this demarcation, the subjectivist may respond that the difference
turns on the fact that the former evaluation does not apply to human behaviour, while the
latter does. This won’t do as prudential imperatives apply to human actions without being
moral imperatives. ‘To catch the next train, you ought to leave immediately’ is an example
of just such a prudential consideration applying to a human act. This leaves the subjectivists
unable to make sense of a distinction we make naturally in our everyday discourse.
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Is Morality Subjective?
If moral reasons are, of necessity, objective reasons (in the sense indicated here of
being impartial reasons), then this raises a crucial question: Why should we act morally? We
could say that we should act morally because that is the right thing to do. However, to give a
moral reason for acting morally simply begs the question. On the other hand, we could
appeal to reason. Applying the axioms of logic or rationality alone, though, will not give
someone who has no inclination to act morally a logically or rationally conclusive reason to
do so.
Moral reasons are not rationally binding reasons in isolation. No matter how many
images of children starving in South Sudan we show a sociopath or a psychopath, they will
not be moved to do anything to alleviate the suffering. Fortunately, most of us are built
genetically and raised socially to engender us with a disposition to act altruistically at least
some of the time. This tendency is a consequence of our ancestors in our distant
evolutionary past forming cooperative social groups. For those social members on the
margin of acting morally, we can appeal to prudential reasons for them to act impartially.
Psychological research is revealing that people who place their interests and energies into
activities that reach beyond their immediate personal indulgences lead more satisfying and
rewarding lives. Working within a wider social context and for a larger purpose gives a
greater sense of meaning to the whole of a person’s life.
4. Conclusion
I have argued here that objectivity is a necessary attribute of ethical thinking.
However, the ‘objectivity’ required is not objectivity in the sense of ‘independent of all
human values and desires’ or ‘factually decidable’ like quasi-empirical propositions. We can
agree on rejecting religious and metaphysical explanations for the grounding of ethics. We
have no need for some mysterious or empirically inaccessible metaphysical realm to
legitimize our moral judgements. Ethics requires objectivity in the sense of being
independent of this person’s or that person’s subjective wants and values. To think ethically
is the inverse of thinking egoistically or selfishly. To think ethically is to think impartially, as
opposed to thinking parochially.
Given that objectivity in this sense is built into the foundation of ethics, it remains an
open question what an impartial stance requires in theory and in practice. Are the principles
of impartiality many or one? Are they deontological or consequentialist, or a combination of
both? Does impartiality favour the maximization of value or the even distribution of value
amongst individuals? It is questions such as these and the practical application of answers to
the enduring ethical dilemmas of our day that make normative ethics so difficult for even
the best and fairest moral thinkers. This nebulous requirement for impartiality explains why
many important ethical questions appear so intractable to the people on opposing sides of
an ethical disagreement. It is this question of how impartial moral agents would act on
quandaries about a just war, abortion, voluntary euthanasia, animal suffering, the social
distribution of wealth, and so on, that drives home how an objective ethical standpoint
leaves much room for rational debate amongst ethicists.
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