"Morality Is Subjective"

How Aesthetics Can Help Us Avoid Misunderstanding The Nature Of Objective Morality

“Morality is subjective”.

This is a sentence that I am virtually guaranteed to hear from my students at least once every semester.

Unfortunately, I don’t think most people really understand what this sentence means, and it can often serve as a thought-stopping device which prevents us from having more meaningful moral debate and discourse with one another when the world goes to shit.

What’s more, I think that 99% of people don’t even believe that morality is subjective, despite what they say in philosophy class.

What’s really going on is that most people just don’t understand what it means to say that “morality is subjective”, and are also rightly confused about the nature and status of morality.

This article is aimed at clearing things up and explaining how there are more ways to think about morality as being “objective” than most people realize.

Intro To Ethics

As some of you know, I recently began teaching university philosophy courses again.

Since one of my areas of expertise is Ethics (also called Moral Philosophy), I am assigned to teach at least one introductory ethics course per semester.

Teaching introductory ethics can be a very interesting affair.

You learn quite a lot about what educated, mature, and intelligent young adults think about the nature of ethics and morality prior to studying philosophy.

While “the times, they are a-changin,” I think that, for the most part, college students who have not studied philosophy provide some very pure insights into how the average person thinks about the nature of morality. One caveat being, of course, that youth can affect how someone views certain moral issues — like rule-following.

What the young ethics student lacks in life-experience, though, they make up for with their intellect, curiosity, and open-mindedness.

In my experience, the vast majority of non-religious students begin their study of ethics believing that “morality is subjective”.

But what does this even mean?

Part of my job as an ethics professor is to help students understand their own commitments more deeply, and think more clearly about what they really believe when they subject themselves to critical scrutiny.

A big part of doing that job consists of explaining all the various ways in which saying that “morality is subjective” does not mean what students think it means, and that they don’t actually believe that it is.

Before I explain how that works, I have a confession to make.

When I majored in philosophy as a Freshman at Rutgers University, I thought that there was no point to studying ethics.

I remember thinking to myself that “morality is subjective” and that there was no point to even studying it. I thought that anything that people have to say about morality is nonsense, and there is no moral truth.

I was essentially a Nihilist in thought (but not in practice).

The weird things is that I can remember that I thought this way and said these things, but I can’t remember what it was really like to be that version of myself.

It is especially difficult today, since I have gone on, ironically, to spend several years studying moral theory and arguing, in my research, that there is a way to explain the objectivity of morality by modernizing Aristotle’s ethical thought.

It may be the case that morality is subjective.

I take that idea very seriously in my research and teaching.

But, if it is subjective, it is likely not for the reasons that the student, or non-religious adult, thinks that it is.

Consider this an introduction to ethics.

Personal Ethics vs. Meta-Ethics

One of the main sources of confusion is, in my opinion, that people take the word “morality”, whether they realize it or not, to refer to one’s personal morality.

Now, everyone has a personal morality.

Your personal morality is made up out of your thoughts, feelings, desires, beliefs, values, and actions. You could say that your character is an expression of your personal morality that others can observe and interact with.

But if “morality” just means personal morality, then to say that “morality is subjective” is equivalent to saying that “personal morality is subjective”.

That’s just obviously true.

Personal morality is, literally, the morality of a particular subject or person.

It’s like saying that “personal morality is personal”.

Likewise, everyone would agree that “personal taste is subjective” — that’s just what it means to call it personal taste.

What I think someone wants to say when they say “morality is subjective” is that morality, understood as some thing out there in the world that is not unique to oneself, is either:

• Not real

• Relative

• Created by humans.

To inquire into the ultimate nature and status of morality is to practice a style of philosophical thinking called meta-ethics.

Meta-ethics is a subfield of philosophy that is primarily aimed at asking and answering “meta” questions about ethics and morality.

To ask yourself, “would it be wrong to lie to her?” is not to ask a “meta” question about morality, it is to ask a direct moral question — in essence, “what should I do?”. But to ask a “meta” question is to ask something like “what does it even mean for anything to be wrong?”, or “what would have to exist for there to be right and wrong?”.

So, when someone says that “morality is subjective”, they could be understood to be trying to say something “meta” about morality as a whole — again, that it is not real, relative, or created by humans.

But here’s the kicker.

To say that morality is not real, relative, or created by humans, does not necessarily have anything to do with it being subjective.

Here’s why:

Morality might not be real because there are no moral truths at all, neither objective or subjective. Additionally, morality might be relative to your culture or society but it’s content doesn’t depend on any individual’s thoughts or feelings. Finally, morality can be created by humans, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is subjective — after all, prisons, the institution of marriage, and the department of motor vehicles are all created by humans and they are not subjective!

(But I do wish I could turn the department of motor vehicles into whatever I subjectively wanted it to be).

Another thing people might mean by saying that “morality is subjective” is that whether someone does or should care about it depends on the subject.

I think this is mostly right.

Whether someone cares about morality is largely due to a whole handful of facts about that individual upbringing, psychological makeup, motivations, and worldview. I don’t think there is any supernatural force named morality in the universe that can make people care about it.

But that is not the point.

You can not care about the law, not follow the law, and do something illegal.

You might even get away with it.

But the requirements of the law are real — they have consequences (if a law is unenforceable, or known to be unenforced, it ceases to be a genuine law).

Whether you care about it or not, when the policeman comes knocking, you know what it means.

One final idea to consider is that when people say “morality is subjective” they are defending a position in meta-ethics called subjective relativism.

This could be what people mean, but I doubt it.

The reason is that subjective relativism is perhaps the stupidest and most indefensible position in meta-ethics.

The basic idea is that morality is relative to what an individual subject thinks is correct. According to this position, what makes something right or wrong is simply the fact that I think that it is right or wrong.

Sucks for you.

This is non-sensical for a lot of reasons, but it is sufficient here to simply point out that virtually no one acts this way, regardless of what they say in a philosophy class (unless they are a sociopath).

In sum, typically when someone says that “morality is subjective” what they seem to be thinking about is the fact, and it is a fact, that everyone has their own set of moral beliefs, their own worldview, and their own judgments about what is good/bad, valuable/disvaluable, beautiful/ugly, right/wrong.

This is undeniable.

In fact, we can’t help but have own conclusions about all sorts of moral matters. Whether it is judging ourselves, others, or society as a whole.

The making of moral judgments (and evaluative judgments more generally) is an inescapable aspect of the human condition.

So yes, morality is personal and everyone has a personal morality which is subjective.

But that is not the same thing as saying that morality —the interpersonal thing that transcends any one individual— is subjective.

Part of the confusion here may be linguistic.

In English, the word “morality” is used as both a count noun and a non-count noun.

The noun “morality” can be used to count personal moralities (in which case there are 8+ billion) or social moralities. But it can also be used to refer to the concept or idea of morality itself — as something that exists (or purports to exist) independently of any individual or society.

The idea that morality (non-count noun) just refers to the man-made rules of the society you find yourself, and that this is what is meant by “subjective”, is a legitimate position in meta-ethics (often referred to as cultural relativism). But this position is not only hard to defend (why is culture subjective? And does my morality change when I move?), it is also not clear whether anyone really lives by it.

In the real world, 99% of people think that there are certain things which are just plain wrong.

They could be wrong about this, but that is how human beings seem to think (at least some of the time).

We may disagree about which things are wrong, and what could possibly explain what makes them wrong, but still agree in general that, at least for certain kinds of actions, they really are wrong.

Ethics and Meta-ethics are about trying to figure out the best ways to resolve such disagreements.

I want to end this post by turning to another area of philosophy that provides some useful insights into what it means for our judgments to be subjective — Aesthetics.

Subjectivity In Aesthetics

This semester, I have had the good fortunate of being assigned to teach a course on Aesthetics.

This is my first time teaching the subject, and I absolutely love it so far.

One reason that I love teaching it so far is that even though the focus of Aesthetics is primarily art, truth, and beauty, thinking about this topic through the lens of philosophy can really help you clarify your thinking in many other areas of philosophy, and human life more generally.

This post itself is an example of the very thing I am describing.

Aesthetics has helped me understand how it can be the case that objective truths or judgments can be deeply connected to personal subjective experience in ways that can be leveraged to explain how the personal nature of moral experience can be compatible with the belief that morality is objective.

To see what I mean, let’s consider the infamous “problem of taste” and see how it can help us get more clear on what it means to call something like morality, or art for that matter, “subjective”.

For much of the 18th century, one of the central tasks of Western aesthetics was to provide an adequate solution to the following problem:

“The problem of taste is the question of to what extent and how interpersonally or intersubjectively valid judgments about what is good and bad in art can be made by individuals on the basis of their own feelings in response to a work”

Paul Guyer, A Modern History Of Aesthetics (3 vol.), pg. 87

To believe that we can “solve” this problem, or make progress on it, is not to deny the very real fact that subjects can’t help but have their own deeply personal subjective responses to the aesthetic world.

In fact, that is a presupposition of the problem — that the personal nature of aesthetic experience is unavoidable.

But does that mean that everything we can say about art is “subjective”?

Not necessarily.

It can be true that everyone has a subjective response which cannot be replaced or equated to anyone else’s, but this doesn’t mean we can’t say anything interesting or important about these responses, how they compare to others, and the art object we are responding it.

The great philosopher David Hume developed a very influential position on the nature of aesthetic judgments and personal taste in his famous essay titled “Of The Standard Of Taste”, published in 1757.

Hume was not only a hardcore empiricist, but a skeptic as well. To see him write seriously about the possibility of “objective” aesthetic judgments is especially interesting.

Hume distinguished between what he called “sentiments”, which are always correct, and “determinations”, which can be either true or false insofar as they are about some object in the world.

Regarding beauty, Hume writes:

“[Beauty] exists merely in the mind which contemplates … and each mind perceives a different beauty”

Hume, Of The Standard Of Taste

Hume thought that beauty did not exist in objects in the world, but in our subjective aesthetic judgments themselves. This means that, for Hume, aesthetic judgment and taste are best considered “sentiments” rather than “determinations”.

But if aesthetic judgments are sentiments, and sentiments can never be right or wrong, doesn’t that mean that “art is subjective”?

Not necessarily.

Well, at least not individually subjective.

Hume thought that individuals who had developed a “strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice” could unite their thoughts and feelings to generate an inter-subjective standard of taste.

So, although aesthetic judgments are rooted in our sentiments and personal perceptions, Hume believed that we could still communicate with each other about them and reach a shared understanding of what makes something count as tasteful.

In a similar vein, the great German philosopher and writer on Aesthetics, Immanuel Kant, thought that aesthetic judgments are characterized by two fundamental conditions:

• First, that the judgment is subjective.

• Second, that the judgment is universal.

This might strike some as odd.

How can a subjective aesthetic judgment be universal?

To call an aesthetic judgment “subjective”, for Kant, meant that the judgment is based on a feeling of pleasure or displeasure in some real person — a subject.

This distinguishes aesthetic judgments from other kinds of judgments, for example, a scientific judgment about whether an element has a certain atomic weight. Unlike aesthetic judgments, scientific judgments do not depend, in any way, upon your subjective pleasure or displeasure.

But, Kant also held that aesthetic judgments are universal.

Let’s consider a crucial passage from Kant in which he explains what this means:

… if [someone] pronounces that something is beautiful, then he expects the very same satisfaction of others: he judges not merely for himself, but for everyone, and speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things. Hence he says that the thing is beautiful, and does not count on the agreement of others with his judgment of satisfaction because he has frequently found them to the agreeable with his own, but rather demands it from them. He rebukes them if they judge otherwise, and denies that they have taste, for he nevertheless requires that they ought to have it; and to this extent one cannot say, “Everyone has his special taste”. This would be as much as to say that there is no taste at all, i.e. no aesthetic judgment that could make a rightful claim to the assent of everyone

Immanuel Kant, The Critique Of The Power Of Judgment

Kant believed that when we make aesthetic judgments of taste, we make universal judgments that demand that others reach agreement or share in our judgment.

In other words, even though our aesthetic judgments are subjective, Kant thought that they aspire to universal validity and make it appear “as if [beauty] were a property of things”.¹

In sum, both Hume and Kant thought that aesthetic judgments are not judgments about the beautiful properties in objects themselves— they are not “objective”. Rather, they are subjective judgments about our perceptions and engagement with objects that can be used to communicate and make demands on others to see things correctly.

In a similar vein, even if it were the case that moral judgments ultimately depend upon individual subjects to perceive the world a certain way, this does not mean that morality itself does not allow for inter-subjective agreement.

It is popular to entertain the idea that, when it comes to questions of value or ethics, everyone’s opinion is equal, or that “everything is subjective”.

But at the end of the day, when we look at the ways we actually think and talk to one another, and the actions we perform, it is quite clear that we all take morality, art, and questions of value not only very seriously, but objectively.

And there is nothing wrong with mixing the subjective and the objective in interesting ways.

If you thought this article was beautiful, or ugly, let other’s know by posting a note about it.

Thanks for reading.

-Paul

1. Zangwill, Nick, "Aesthetic Judgment", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy