The question of subjectivity or objectivity of morals sharply divides philosophical opinion. This essay is sharply inclined towards the former thought and strongly rejects the notion of an objective morality. Through this rejection claim, it is held that values are not part of a world fabric. The preliminary question of what constitutes morality has some strong bearing on position. Moral value envisages not just moral goodness-interpreted as wrongfulness or rightfulness of an action-but also other things closely or loosely linked to moral values and disvalues including obligation, duty, the sense that an action or thought is contemptible or rotten and so on. This view affirms the approach taken here that moral subjectivism is reflective of one’s attitudes and feelings. This thought is significant given the conflation of moral subjectivism to moral skepticism. There is merit, broadly speaking, in considering non-moral values particularly those of aesthetical nature such as beauty in this category. Though these have no explicit consideration here, their value should not be lost more so given the similarity of consideration in both moral and aesthetical values. There would, in fact, be a degree of implausibility in an approach that gives varying evaluative status to either.
There is need to start by conceding the long tradition in European moral philosophy that lays claim to the objectivity of morals. Kant held that the categorical imperative is not just imperative and categorical but also objective. He points out that when rational beings give unto themselves moral law, the law becomes necessary and determinate. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle points out that all things aim at achieving good and that ethics are scientific in nature. The value and goal of ethics, he adds, is not so much in their knowledge but practice. Aristotle does not refute knowledge of what is good for human beings nor reject its rational basis, but rather insists on its plainness and its intrinsic desirability by man. (Norman, 1998).
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Samuel Clarke, the influential rationalist, holds that a consideration of rules may lead to them being seen as commands or positive will of God. He further points out that the eternal and necessary differences amongst things makes it reasonable and fit for the adoption of universal rules upon which to act. The sentimentalist Hutcheson says that the virtue that we perceive to guide our actions is given to us. Hume doubles on the objectivity tradition by claiming that the distinction separating virtue and vice is not merely founded on perceptions of reason or relations of objects (Norman, 1998).
Richard Prince argued that right and wrong are not qualities of our minds but real characters of action. He is deeply critical of the idea of moral sense because it would tend to make virtue a matter of taste and a quality of mind. This objectivism is not only a feature of a philosophical strand but can also be found in ordinary thought and is implicit in meaning and definitions of moral terms. This extravagance is quite evident in Moore’s definition of good as an unnatural quality. And yet, it would not be so wrong to say that in moral contexts, the attachment of good to non-natural qualities fails to consider the room left for peculiar evaluations, prescription and intrinsic aspects of this quality. The conflicts of opinion between naturalist and non-cognitive views on the central and basic meanings of morality help demonstrate this point.
The relativity and subjectivity of values are affirmed by variations in moral codes across societies, over time and classes within a complex social system. This is certainly true as a description of morality and indeed an anthropological fact. Nonetheless, it is not just the differences in moral beliefs that disabuse us of the objectivity of moral values: there are considerable differences of opinion in such domains as biology, cosmology, and history, though this by no means implies that there are no objective issues in these areas to disagree about. However, these scientific disagreements primarily stem from hypotheses grounded on inadequate evidence or speculative inferences, making a similar interpretation of moral disagreements implausible.
Moral disagreements are reflective of divergences in participation and adherence to different ways of life. The causal linkage is clear: people accept monogamous ways of life since they participate in it. Even within seemingly monogamous societies, moral judgments are not purely conventional: there are moral reformers and moral heretics, those who have rebelled against practices and rules of their respective societies owing to differing moral reasons and whose reasoning we may, currently or in future, endorse. The relativity of morality in offering succor to the subjectivist claims, it has to be conceded, lays not so much in the hypothesis that they express differences of perceptions-most of which suffer serious inadequacies and distortions- but in the hypothesis that they reflect varying ways of life (Zimmerman, 2006).
It might, however, be countered, as Sidgwick’s different methods of ethics do, that objective validity is grounded not on moral codes and rules but the general principles present, at times implicitly, in all societies. That is, the universal principle or rule is that one ought to conform to the rules of life in which he partakes, profits or relies on. It thus follows that these general principles, coupled with separate concrete circumstances, social patterns and preferences, in one way or another begets varying specific moral norms (Norman, 1998). There is thus some plausibility to be found in the claim that variations in accepted principles will generate different moral codes.
If indeed there were objective moral values, then they would be qualities or entities with some strangeness, totally different from other constituents of the universe. If we were aware of them, then it would have to be through ways utterly different from the conventional ways of knowing; it would have to be through special faculties of perception such as intuition. Intuitionists have in fact spoken of faculties of moral intuition. And yet, intuitionism has for a long time now been out of favor, and its implausibilities have been widely noted. What is significant to point out, and it has received little stress in the past, is that most objectivist claims of values are in fundamental ways committed to the central thesis of intuitionism (Zimmerman, 2006). The suggestion that complex moral problems are solved or that moral judgments are made by sitting down and partaking in ethical intuition would at best appear to be a travesty of moral thinking.
When we ask the fundamental question on how we become aware of the truth of these ethical premises, how we acquire these authoritative prescriptions or how we ascertain the cogency of these ethical patterns, our ordinary sensory accounts, logical construction, introspection, conceptual analysis or a coupling of all offer a less than satisfactory answer. To suggest that a special form of intuition could provide a more compelling account appears lame, and yet it is this reasoning that the clear-headed objectivist has to resort. In fact, some of the moral objectivists have, instead of confronting these issues, sought to find partners in guilt. Richard Prince, for instance, has contended that it is not only the moral knowledge that the empiricism of Locke and Hume has been incapable of explaining, but also other forms of knowledge and ideas such as identity, diversity, essence, inertia, substance, infinity of time and space, necessity, existence, causation, and power (Norman, 1998).
Objectivist moral views are not new in philosophical thought. As it has been demonstrated in this essay, there is a long-standing philosophical tradition addressing this question. This means there is a vast variety of arguments advancing both subjectivist and objectivist accounts of morality. It has been argued that despite the endurance of objectivist claims, they suffer from serious deficiencies and that there are serious reasons to think that morality is a fundamentally subjective affair.
References
Norman, R. (1998). The Moral Philosophers: An Introduction to Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zimmerman, M. (2006). Is Moral Obligation Objective or Subjective. Cambridge University Press.
