Moral Subjectivism & The Philosophy of Ethics
A collection of my thoughts on Philosophy, Meta-Ethics, Religion, and more.
The current purpose of this blog has become to share my thoughts about:
I started this blog for the purpose of recording my thoughts on meta-ethics; specifically my belief in moral subjectivism, or more formally, moral anti-realism. Hence, the domain name http://www.moralsubjectivism.com I’ve long been interested in this topic – from the time I was a teenager. As a teen, I questioned why there was so much political disagreement on television and why no one could offer an argument to clear up debates over polarizing issues such as abortion. Certainly, I thought, there must be a right answer to these problems.
I reviewed the beliefs of several major religions, but found them unconvincing and implausible. Even as a young child I had serious doubts about the existence of God. It seemed suspicious to my young mind that adults could not offer clear answers to simple questions like “How do you know God is really there?” Adults and books from the library were so good at providing answers to most anything I was curious about… except for this matter of ‘God’. God – who some adults insisted existed with absolute certainty, but were unable to offer evidence or a clear explanation. Some said that you have to have faith, but were then unable to answer my questions about where faith comes from and how one goes about getting faith if they don’t have it. I was not satisfied with religious explanations of morality and found religion lacking in other ways.
During my first year in college, in the early 1980’s, I had a discussion with a friend about how one goes about determining what the right thing to do is and how I wished there were a class on this topic. She suggested that I look into philosophy. This was exactly the right answer! It seems so painfully obvious now, but I simply had never been exposed to the formal study of philosophy. I’d been contemplating philosophical questions, but didn’t know how to categorize them. The Internet did not exist then. Philosophy was not taught in high schools. Many places had only four channels on broadcast TV – ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS. You didn’t just Google something on a whim and then get thousands of links to histories finest philosophical thinkers.
I immediately dug into the course catalog and found what I was looking for in the philosophy department: Intro to Ethics. This was one of two philosophy classes that I took in college; the other was Intro to Philosophy. Neither had a prerequisite.
Rawls‘s A Theory of Justice and Mackie‘s Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong were published just in the previous decade so were brand new in terms of philosophy. My classes touched on these.
In hindsight, The instructor for the Intro to Ethics class did a very good job. It gave me a solid foundation in both ethics and philosophy that has stayed with me. The three texts we read were:
We covered a lot more in class:
If I come across the papers that I wrote for this class I might post them to this blog. I hand wrote them, spell checked them with a dictionary, and then typed them on my roommate’s manual type writer.
The professor’s name was Norman and he jokingly claimed to have invented normative ethics. He also said one thing that I know some will disagree with: morals and ethics are two names for the same thing. Some colleges offer “Intro to Moral Philosophy” while others offer “Intro to Ethics” – these courses cover the same material. However, I have encountered some people online that insist that morals and ethics are two very distinct things. Although the nature of the supposed distinction varies greatly from one source to the next.
The material that really opened my eyes was reading Hume and discussing the objective vs. subjective distinction. Eureka! maybe all those hotly debated moral issues might not have a right answer in any absolute sense. This wasn’t just some hair-brained idea, it was a respected concept in moral philosophy that had a name (actually, several names). Moral anti-realism is the name that I currently feel is most accurate. Even the moral philosophers that believed this to be flat wrong still had to address it, if only to try an disprove it.
The subjectivity of moral values seemed to accommodate both the moral agreement and moral disagreement in the world. The one thing it didn’t have to offer was comfort for someone looking for clear guidance. I wasn’t looking for guidance, but rather, for truth – ugly as it may be. I occasionally stayed after class to talk philosophy with the instructor. He once asked me “but don’t you want for moral values to be objective?” My answer was that “what I want has no bearing on the truth of if morals are subjective or objective.” After that he seemed to realize that I wasn’t just some silly 18-year-old looking for a rebellious idea.
I still enjoy Hume and count him as a favorite. I didn’t fully appreciate Plato or Kant at the time. The writings of the Greek philosophers unearthed all, or at least most, of the key questions of philosophy. The ideas from Plato’s allegory of the cave are still being rehashed in The Matrix movies. He conceived of a Matrix based on nothing more advanced than stone-age technology and forever more blew open the understanding of reality. As I have continued to read philosophy, I have encountered Kant in several fields. I don’t always agree with his conclusions, but I am impressed with his ground-breaking theories and the breadth and depth of this work. He is, in a sense, the father of our modern conception of rights. He had philosophies of aesthetics and even comedy.
If not for studying philosophy, I would never have been able to laugh myself to tears over these few paragraphs.
Foundational questions in moral philosophy tend to cross over into other areas. Questions of knowledge (epistemology), political philosophy, the nature of other types of value judgements (aesthetics), free will, psychology, and theology are unavoidable if you dabble in ethics for a while. So my blog will also cover these topics as I find them interesting. Ethics is really an evaluation of human behavior, so behavior in general is interesting.
Lastly, sometimes I just write personal thoughts or observations and post them here too.
Thanks for visiting!
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