Note: I didn’t write this essay, nor do I own the blog where it came from. I’m just sharing it. The essay text is displayed below this line.
Whether morality is an objective property of the universe, or instead the subjective opinion of humans, is one of the longest running issues in philosophy. Jerry Coyne recently returned to the theme, arguing that morality was subjective, and, as I usually am, I was surprised by the number of commentators arguing the contrary.
This debate seems hampered by a lack of clarity on what “objective” and “subjective” moralities are. Coyne gave a sensible definition of “objective” morality as being the stance that something can be discerned to be “morally wrong” through reasoning about facts about the world, rather than by reference to human opinion.
If morality were objective, it would have to be conceivable that the statement “George’s actions were wrong and he deserves to be punished” would be true even if every human in the world were of the opinion, “George’s actions seem fine to me, perhaps even laudable”.
Thus, if morality were an absolute set by a god, something could be immoral even if every human disagreed. If, instead, human feelings and desires are what ultimately count, then that is a subjective morality.
Thus, a subjective morality is strongly preferable to an objective one! That’s because, by definition, it is about what we humans want. Would we prefer to be told by some third party what we should do, even if it is directly contrary to our own deeply held sense of morality?
Given that an objective morality would be highly undesirable, why do so many philosophers and others continue to try hard to rescue an objective morality?
I suspect that they’re actually trying to attain objective backing for what is merely their own subjective opinion of what is moral. This is the trick the religious have long played, inventing a god in their own image who can back them up by turning “I want …” into “God wants …”.
Secular philosophers should not play this game by hankering after objective morality, we should have confidence in the simple and honest “I want …”. We humans have a lot to be proud of: by thinking it through and arguing amongst ourselves, we have advanced morality hugely, with Western society today giving vastly better treatment to individuals, to women, children, religious minorities, foreigners, those of other races, the disabled and mentally ill, criminals, etc, than any previous society.
So why are we all so afraid of admitting that, yes, morality is subjective? I suggest that this owes to several misconceptions.
Subjective does not mean unimportant. A subjective morality is one rooted in human feelings and desires. These are the things that are most important to us, indeed the only things important to us!
Subjective does not mean arbitrary. Human feelings are not arbitrary. It is not arbitrary that we love our children while most of us dislike and fear spiders and snakes, nor that most of us like the taste of chocolate while shunning excrement. Our feelings and attitudes are rooted in human nature, being a product of our evolutionary heritage, programmed by genes. None of that is arbitrary.
Subjective does not mean that anyone’s opinion is “just as good”. Most humans are in broad agreement on almost all of the basics of morality. After all “people are the same wherever you go”. Most law codes overlap strongly, such that we can readily live in a foreign country with only minor adjustment for local customs. A psychopathic child killer’s opinion is not regarded as “just as good” by most of us, and if we decide morality by a broad consensus — and that, after all, is how we do decide morality — then we arrive at strong communal moral codes.
But still people hanker after “objectivity”, and worry that a subjectively decided communal morality is somehow insufficient. Here, then, are six reasons why the whole notion of “objective” morality is nonsense.
(1) Our morality is evolved.
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, said Dobzhansky, and morality certainly makes no sense except as the product of our evolutionary heritage. Our moral sense is one of a number of systems developed by evolution to do a job: the immune systems counters infection, the visual system gives us information about the world, and our moral feelings are there as a social glue to enable us to cooperate with other humans.
As a product of blind Darwinian evolution, our morals will have developed solely from the pragmatic consideration of what works, what enables us to benefit from cooperation and thus leave more descendants. For interacting with another human, what matters is not what is “objectively” moral (whatever that means), but what that human considers to be moral.
Human intuition that morality is objective is really the only argument (if we are honest) that that is the case. And yet evolution doesn’t operate according to what “is moral”, it operates according to what helps someone to have more descendants. Thus, even if there were an “absolute” morality, there is no reason to suppose that it would have any connection to our own human sense of morality. Anyone arguing for objective morality by starting with human morality and intuition — which of course is how it is always done — is thus basing their case on a non sequitur.
(2) Humans are only one species.
An objective morality must, by definition, be independent of human opinion and thus be independent of humans. There are trillions of galaxies in the known universe, each with trillions of stars and trillions of planets, and for all we know there may be millions of species on many of those planets.
And yet, surprise surprise, the “objective” moral systems that people argue for are all about human welfare and just happen to bear a striking resemblance to the morals of that one species of ape on just one planet around a fairly unremarkable star in a fairly unremarkable galaxy. This is simply projection, human hubris.
Medieval theologians placed humans at the centre of the universe; aren’t we above projecting our own parochial notions of social interactions into some sort of objective property of the universe? Isn’t it obvious that our social interactions (and thus our moral senses) will depend on the details of our species and our ecological niche?
A K-selected species would have very different morality from an r-selected species. A haplodiploid or eusocial species would have very different morality from us. So would species where hareems are normal. Morality would be very different in territorial animals than in non-territorial animals. And who knows what variations there are strewn across the trillions of galaxies in the visible universe? And yet people want to consider one species alone from one planet alone and project that onto everything else!
Editor’s Note: The r/K selection dichotomy mentioned here is actually false. It’s also worth noting that this argument implies that different human races could have different conceptions of morality.
(3) Starting from “well being” is subjective.
Many attempts at establishing an objective morality try to argue from considerations of human well-being. OK, but who decided that human well-being is what is important? We did! This whole enterprise starts with a subjective leap. Yes, human well-being is what morality is all about but human well-being is all about human feelings and preferences, and is thus subjective.
(4) Aggregation schemes are arbitrary.
So you’ve decided that well-being is what matters. Good start. But, if you want to arrive at an objective morality you now need a scheme for aggregating the well-beings of many creatures onto some objective scale, such that you can read off what you “should” do and how you “should” balance the competing interests of different people.
The beauty of accepting that morality is ultimately subjective is that you reject the whole concept of objective aggregation onto an absolute scale, and thus an otherwise insoluble problem disappears.
(see the rest of the post in the link)
Absolutely.
That’s a poor definition. It tries to oppose facts about the worlds to human opinions. While whether humans have particular opinions or not is also a matter of facts about the world.
The fault here lies on the terms itself. Such dychotomies as “objective/subjective” or “real/non-real” or “stance-independent/stance-dependent” are very unhelpful. Artifacts of ancient philosophy which didn’t understand map-territory relations, treated mind and matter as separate magisteriums and therefore were tremendously confused about basically everything, unable to separate baby from the bathwater.
I don’t think we need content on LessWrong that keeps perpetuating this confusion. Therefore, I’m downvoting this post even though I seem to agree with about 80% of it.
I’m not 100% sure I know what I’m talking about, but it feels like that’s splitting hairs. Are you arguing that the distinction between objective and subjective are “very unhelpful,” because the state of people’s subjective beliefs are technically an objective fact of the world?
In that case, why don’t you argue that all similar categorizations are unhelpful, e.g. map vs. territory?
It’s unhelpful due to a an implicit (and in our case somewhat explicit) assumption that “subjective” and “objective” are in opposition to each other. That it’s two different magisteriums and things are either one or the other.
Map and territory framework lacks this assumption. It’s core insight is that maps can and indeed quite often are embedded in the territory. Of course if one does not understand it and uses “map and territory” simply as synonyms to “subjective and objective” then it doesn’t matter which terms are used and they are equally unhelpful.
To me, it looks like the blogger (Coel) is trying to say that morality is a fact about what we humans want, rather than a fact of the universe which can be deduced independently from what anyone wants.
My opinion is Coel makes this clear when he explains, “Subjective does not mean unimportant.” “Subjective does not mean arbitrary.” “Subjective does not mean that anyone’s opinion is “just as good”.”
“Separate magisteriums” seems to refer to dualism, where people believe that their consciousness/mind exists outside the laws of physics, and cannot be explained by the laws of physics.
But my opinion is Coel didn’t imply that subjective facts are a “separate magisterium” in opposition to objective facts. He said that subjective morals are explained by objective facts: “Our feelings and attitudes are rooted in human nature, being a product of our evolutionary heritage, programmed by genes. None of that is arbitrary.”
But I’m often wrong about these things don’t take me too seriously :/
You can claim that subjective attitudes are still part of reality ontologically , but the point is that they function differently epistemologically . Opinions and beliefs and for the and falsehoods are all made of atoms, but all function differently. There are potentially as many subjective attitudes as there are people, and they are variable across time as well. The arbitrariness and lack of coherence is what causes the problems. Objectivity is worth having in ethics, because a world in which prisoners have done something really wrong, and really deserve their punishment is a better than a world in which prisoners just have desires the majority don’t like.
Thats running together two claims—the epistemic claim that there are moral truths, and the ontological claim that moral value is a property of the universe (as opposed to be something more like a logical truth).
That’s not such a high bar. Our ancestors accepted things like slavery and the subordination of women , which we now.deplore—we think they were universally wrong.
That doesn’t follow, since nihilism, error theory, etc. are possible answers...which means you need to positively argue for (some form of subjectivism) , not.just argue against objectivism.
No it isnt.
If we are rational , we prefer to believe what is true. So we would defer to an omega if there were moral truths, and if we trusted it to know them. Just as rational people defer to scientists and mathematicians. And.of course, objective morality doesn’t have to be based on commandment theory in the first place.
How do you know? Moral subjectivism implies any moral stance is as good as any other...any stance is rendered true (or true-for-the-person) just by believing it. But moral progress is only defineable against an objective standard. That’s one of the arguments for moral objectivism.
You are characterizing objectivists as being emotion driven...but a selection of dry arguments can be found in the literature, which you should have read before writing the OP.
Yes it does. Individual level subjectivism is the claim that simply having a moral stance.makes it correct.
That’s favouring group level subjectivism over individual subjectivism. But similar problems apply: the group can declare any arbitrary thing to be morally right. You can fix that problem.by regarding group level morality as an evolutionary adaptation , so that well adapted.ethics is sort-of-true a s poorly adapted ethics is sort-of-false… but then you are most of the way to objectivism.
That doesn’t support the claim that morality is subjective, only the claim.that it is natural. Some kinds of objectivism are supernaturalistic but not all.
There are also a bunch of pragmatic arguments , like the need to justify punish ments, the need to define moral progress, etc.
I agree! But that shows morality isn’t universal—not that it isn’t objective facts. Objective facts can be local. Objective morality can vary with anything except moral stances.
Its clearly the case that different kinds of society—rich versus poor, nomads versus agricultrualists—have different kinds of de facto ethics.
That’s a rather minimal amount of subjectivism. Everything downstream of that can be objective , so its really a compromise position. (Harris’s theory, which you seem to have in mind here , fails at being a completely objective theory, whilst succeeding in being a mostly objective theory).
No, objective morality doesn’t have to be universalistic.
It’s also possible (and I think very probable) that “ethical” means something like “conducive to well-being”. Similar to how “tree” means something like “plant with a central wooden trunk”. Imagine someone objecting: “OK, but who decided that trees need to have a wooden trunk? We did!” That’s true in some weak sense (though nobody really “decided” that “tree” refers to trees), but it doesn’t mean it’s subjective whether or not trees have a wooden trunk.
Though I think the meaning of “ethical” is a bit different, as it doesn’t just take well-being into account but also desires. The various forms of theories in normative ethics (e.g. the numerous theories of utilitarianism, or Extrapolated Volition) can be viewed as attempts to analyze what terms like “ethics” or “good” mean exactly.
That in itself isn’t a good definition , because it doesn’t distinguish ethics from, e.g. Medicine...and it doesn’t tell you whose well being. De facto people are ethically obliged to do things which against their well being and refrain from doing some things which promote their own wellbeing...I can’t rob people to pay my medical bills. (People also receive objective punishments, which makes an objective approach domestics justifiable).
Whose desires? Why?
They could also be seen as attempts to find different denotations of a term with shared connotation. Disagreement , as opposed to talking-past, requires some commonality
(And utilitarianism is a terrible theory of obligation, a standard objection which its rationalist admirers have no novel response to).
Promoting your own well-being only would be egoism, while ethics seems to be more similar to altruism.
I guess of all beings that are conscious. Perhaps relative to their degree of consciousness. Though those are all questions which actual theories in normative ethics try to answer.
Not sure what this is asking for, but if it is “why is this analysis correct rather than another, or none?”—because of the meaning of the involved term. (Compare “why not count bushes as “trees” as well?”—“because that would be talking about something else”)
This doesn’t reflect the actual methodology, where theories are judged in thought experiments on whether they satisfy our intuitive, pre-theoretical concepts. That’s the same as in other areas of philosophy where conceptual analysis is performed.
Well, yes. (You don’t have to start from.a tabular area , and then proceed in baby steps, since there is a lot of prior art)
But “desires” is not how “ethics” is defined in standard dictionaries or philosophy. It’s not “the” definition.
That’s irrelevant. Rival theories still need shared connotation.