Stop Confusing Ethics with How You Feel About Things (Part III)

Actually, What Do People Even Mean When They Say, “Ethics is Subjective”?

Photo by Ed Leszczynskl on Unsplash

“Ethics is subjective.” I hear it all the time. It’s regarded as a platitude. And it’s a reason so many people get tripped up when talking about solutions to the people who are creating the problems in the first place.

Here's an example. Ethics in tech - about data, AI , blockchain, VR/AR, robotics, etc. - is all the rage among a small but growing set of people in the tech community. But there is resistance. Chief AI or Information or Data Officers, developers and data scientists, like most everyone else in tech community, think ethics is "subjective." And the people who care about ethics in the tech community say, "Well, look, of course ethics is subjective, but..." And now they've lost their audience.

Why should the technologists continue to listen? If you're going to tell them why chocolate is better than vanilla, or talk about an issue where no one can be wrong, why should they change their behavior?

In Part I of this series, I talked about what ethics is all about. In Part II, I reviewed three really bad reasons for thinking ethics is subjective or not within the realm of fact and fiction. This article is a bit more fundamental. It points out that people use the word ‘subjective’, and its counterpart, ‘objective’, in all sorts of ways, and this leads to confusions, misguided conclusions, and failed attempts to persuade people that ethics matters.

Fair warning: I’m a philosopher, and that means (among other things) I love nothing more than a good distinction. And even better, disambiguating a set of distinctions. Why? Because our ability to see the world clearly depends on the lenses through which we view it. When we run concepts together, our lenses are smudged. We can’t see clearly. And then we take wrong turns and wind up at undesirable destinations. Thinking carefully about distinctions and words and concepts allows us to see more clearly, to see the world as it is, which enables us to draw better conclusions and make better decisions. It’s a kind of freedom. Being careful about how we use key concepts is an exercise in autonomy.

Okay, enough waxing philosophic about disambiguating distinctions. Here we go…

Distinction #1: Objective vs subjective judgments