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

Three Really Bad Reasons for Thinking Ethics is Subjective

In Part I I explained what the domain of ethics (more or less) includes and then spent some time explaining the difference between ethical beliefs, on the one hand, and what is ethically right/wrong/good/bad/etc. on the other. But even with that distinction in place, some people think ethics is subjective in some other way. More specifically, they might think that ethics is subjective in the sense that there are no facts about what is ethically right/wrong/good/bad. Or they might say that ethics itself, not just people’s ethical beliefs, vary by culture or region or even by individual.

Having been a philosophy professor for 10 years and having taught it for 15, I’ve noticed three primary reasons for the belief that ethics is subjective, each of which is flatly misguided. I’ll lay out the reasons and then explain what’s wrong with them. And to be clear: this is not just my view that these are bad reasons. Philosophers don’t agree about a lot, but there’s as close to consensus as you can get that even if ethics is subjective, it’s not for any of these reasons.

So, welcome to Part II of “Stop Confusing Ethics With How You Feel about Things: Three Really Bad Reasons for Thinking Ethics is Subjective”

Now that’s a punchy title…

Really Bad Reason #1

Ethics is subjective because people disagree about what’s right and wrong. People engage in ethical disputes; they disagree about whether abortion and capital punishment are morally permissible, whether you should lie to the police to protect your friend, and whether collecting people’s data without their knowing it in exchange for the otherwise free use of your services is ethically permissible. And since there is so much disagreement – so many different moral and ethical beliefs – ethics is subjective; there’s no truth to the matter.

Really Bad Reason #2

Science delivers us truth. Ethics isn’t science, so it doesn’t deliver us truth. Science, and more specifically, the scientific method, is the only way we discover truths about the world. Empirical observations (“seeing is believing”) and investigations (scientific experiments, for instance) deliver facts about the world. Everything else is interpretation, which is to say, subjective. Again, ethics is subjective because empirical observations have a monopoly on truth; ethics and ethical inquiry, because it is not empirical inquiry, concerns the realm of non-truth. In short: Only scientifically verifiable claims are true.

Really Bad Reason #3

Ethics requires an authority figure to say what’s right and wrong; otherwise, it’s subjective. Who’s to say what’s right and wrong? You have your beliefs and I have mine and that other person has theirs. And it’s not like we have scientific evidence that one view is right and another is wrong, so who’s to say what’s right and what’s wrong? It’s all subjective. Or in short: If there are ethical truths, then there must be an authority figure who makes this right and that wrong.

What’s So Bad about the Bad Reasons

Did I quite possibly give a bit away or put the car before the horse in labelling these things “really bad reasons”? Perhaps. So now let me explain why they deserve their monikers.

[If you have my book, Ethical Machines, the rest of this piece is taken from Chapter 1 and so you can read it there if you don’t have a paid subscription.]