Subjective Opinion Ethics
If you believe that the “right thing to do” is a matter of personal or collective public opinion, then you believe in a “Subjective Opinion” notion of Ethics. The ethical thing to do is whatever you “intuit” is the right thing to do; or whatever you feel most emotionally “good” about; or whatever you feel is the consensus of other people’s opinions on what you should do.
Depending on the individual expressing the ethical opinions, Subjectivist Ethics even though it is anti-realist by nature, can be compatible with both Cognitivism (in that the speaker can express the opinion that she is stating moral facts) and Non-Cognitivism (in that the speaker can express the opinion that there are no moral facts, only attitudes). It might also be compatible with Moral Absolutism (in that the speaker can hold certain of her moral opinions to apply regardless of circumstances) and Moral Relativism (in that the speaker can assert that the truth of moral claims is relative to the attitudes of the individuals making the claims). It stands in contrast to Moral Realism (under which ethical statements are deemed to be independent of personal attitudes). Subjectivist Ethics starts with a person’s personal opinion on what is right or wrong, what is moral or immoral, what is good or evil. And that is where it stops. Subjectivist Ethics does not allow inquiries into why you might have these opinions. Allowing such investigations moves the moral agent towards Conventionalism or Contractualism or one of the other more formal theories.
Many different sources of opinion have been cited by various philosophers. The most obvious, of course, is the individual’s personal opinion, feeling, or emotional attitude. This is the approach taken by A.J.Ayer, for example. But other approaches have included the Social Consensus, social customs, habits or thoughts, and cultural norms. And as we will see later, an Authoritative Rules notion of Ethics overlaps to some extent with a Subjective Opinion notion.
No matter what they tell us
No matter what they do
No matter what they teach us
What we believe is true
— Boyzone(1)
As we have explored, people have different opinions on moral matters. But Subjectivist Ethics maintains that there are no moral “facts of the matter” and no one is “right” in any objective sense. People just feel differently, and that is the end of it. Ethics becomes a matter of taste. I like chocolate and Abortion and the Liberal-Left. You like pistachio and the Right to Life and the Conservative-Right. There is no accounting for taste. You just have to tolerate the differences of opinion.
A person who adopts Subjectivist Ethics is necessarily morally infallible, because Subjectivist Ethics maintains that there are no objective moral properties or facts about which your opinions might be mistaken. Moral statements are made true or false by the attitudes of the moral agent. Any moral statement just implies an attitude, opinion, personal preference or feeling held by the speaker. For a statement to be considered morally correct merely means that it correctly reflects the opinions and attitudes of the person of interest. Your opinions are your opinions, and you are the sole arbiter of what those opinions are.
David Hume is perhaps the best known philosophical advocate of ethical subjectivism. But by applying the processes of logic and the standards of logical consistency, philosophers have developed his moral approach into the non-cognitive theory of Emotivism. Emotivism departs from Subjectivist Ethics because it maintains a logically consistent doctrine that moral statement are not truth apt. Rather they should be understood as emotional exclamations. Jean-Paul Sartre, another well known personage, advocated subjectivist ethics as a form of moral relativism. For Sartre, social conventions might be an important input for directing one’s moral conduct, but only one’s individual moral conscience has any real authenticity as a source of moral truth. According to Sartre, all moral statements are true if the person stating them believes them to be true.
“When we assert that this or that has ‘value,’ we are giving expression to our own emotions, not to a fact which would still be true if our personal feelings were different.” Bertrand Russell(2)
Ethical Subjectivism has the apparent advantage of providing a simple explanation of what morality is. “Morality is whatever I think it is!” To the moral agent, one’s own ethical opinions often have the internal appearance of objectivity. When expressing moral judgments and opinions, it feels like making, or at least attempting to make, an objective statement. Ethical Subjectivists frequently believe their moral statements to be fact-stating. But this is an artifact of the assertive nature of most ethical statements. They very often have some implied factual implications. But since there is no fact of the matter beyond the moral agent’s opinion, such statements cannot be considered as making an objectively true assertion.
The downside of Subjectivist Ethics is that there can be no discourse about disagreements of moral opinions. If you think that A (abortion, say) is right, then A is right for you. If I think that A is wrong, then A is wrong for me. Think back to the Ethical Relativism cointained in Blackburn’s joke cited in the Introduction. The difference in attitudes is fundamental. There is no recourse but violence to resolve any conflict, because Subjectivist Ethics offers no way for the parties engaged in ethical debate to resolve their disagreements. If you think that Radical Islamic Terrorists are immoral and evil, that is just your opinion. You have no basis from which to argue that they are doing anything objectively immoral. More to the point, Subjectivist Ethics, by recommending toleration for different moral attitudes, actually generates moral intolerance. Subjectivist Ethics maintains that only my own moral opinions carry moral weight, and yours (if they disagree with mine) carry no weight at all in my moral judgments (“I am right! You are Wrong!”). Subjectivist Ethics thereby classifies your moral opinions as irrelevant to me, and vice versa of course. And if that is the case, then that demotes the importance of your interests and projects in my moral decisions. Is there any better source for mutual intolerance?
Adherents of any of the various flavors of Subjective Opinion Ethics also must deal with these two challenges. Firstly, there is nothing within such a system of Ethics that requires the various opinions be logically consistent and not mutually contradictory. And secondly, there is nothing within such a system of Ethics that guides the adherent in choosing which of a set of contradictory opinions to apply in any situation, or protects against a ludicrous misapplication of some opinion. It is impossible, therefore, to employ logical reasoning or rational analysis in an exploration of the consequences and implications of the relevant opinions. Consequently, in practical application “Ethical” behavior is almost always the result of a non-rational and non-logical subjective opinion as to which (or whose) opinion to apply when, where, and how.
“My belief is that if I say something, it goes. I am the law, and if you don’t like it, you die. If I don’t like you or I don’t like what you want me to do, you die.”
Eric David Harris (1981–1999), teen gunman in the Columbine High School massacre.(3)
Subjectivism in Ethics is like Solipsism in Metaphysics. They both render discussion and argument irrelevant. The entire topic of Philosophy is rendered impotent. Resolving any disagreement in opinion can only be accomplished by violence. If you cannot tolerate the actions resulting from the other person’s opinions, your only recourse is to kill him. But science, technology and philosophy are based on the assumption that there are truths out there, independent of our opinions. So Subjectivism is a denial of Reality.
Subjective Opinion Ethics (both personal and collective) implies some consequences that, initially at least, appear to be if not counter-intuitive then at least not normally expected:
- Different people will have different opinions and hence different moral codes, and reach different moral judgments. No two individuals, or social groups, will have exactly the same set of values, goals, and priorities. This is the natural result of the fact that the determination of what the relevant opinion is, and how it should be determined, will differ between any two such individuals or social groups.
- There can be no standard that can be used to judge one moral judgment as better or worse than any other moral judgment. To a modern Canadian, to suggest that is it morally correct to eat one’s dead father would seem ludicrous. But to some former aboriginal tribes of Borneo, this would have been the proper moral thing to do. To suggest that they should cremate or inter their dead fathers would have been regarded as highly immoral and terribly irreverent. Therefore, the eating of the dead cannot be regarded as inherently right or wrong in and of itself. It is a matter of personal attitudes, which will vary from individual to individual and from culture to culture.
- Your own moral judgments, or the moral judgments of your own social group have no special status. Your opinion is merely one among many equally acceptable standards of behaviour. While a popular attitude among adherents of the “Multiculturalism” school of social etiquette, it tends to become less comfortable as the differences in cultural practices become wider. Is female circumcision morally acceptable or is it morally unacceptable abuse?
- There can be no “Universal Truths” in Ethics. There can be no moral standards that hold for all peoples in all places. Each individual will develop their own ethical truth, based on their own set of values, goals and priorities. If there are any congruencies between the ethical principles of individuals, it is coincidental or historical and not the result of any basic underlying Ethical Universal.
- It is mere arrogance for us to judge the conduct of other cultures against our own moral standards. It was morally right for the Romans to keep slaves, and to hold jousts to the death in the Coliseum, and to indulge in infanticide of baby girls in favor of baby boys. That we regard these things as terribly immoral is irrelevant. The consensus of opinion of their culture made these activities Morally correct.
While this approach to ethics may be the “best” one, and certainly has some appeal to those with a liberal political bent, the difficulty in determining what the Consensus Opinions are with any degree of accuracy; the problem of justifying the application of other people’s opinions to individual behaviour choices; and the counter-intuitive consequences cited above, would suggest that there might be a “better” approach.
Here is a lengthy (abridged) quote from the Speech of John Galt (key character in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”(4) Ayn Rand expresses the prime criticism of Subjectivist Ethics much better than I could ever do:
“You have heard no concepts of morality but the mystical or the social. You have been taught that morality is a code of behavior imposed on you by whim, the whim of a supernatural power or the whim of society, to serve God’s purpose or your neighbor’s welfare, to please an authority beyond the grave or else next door – but not to serve your life or pleasure. Your pleasure, you have been taught, is to be found in immorality, your interests would best be served by evil, and any moral code must be designed not for you, but against you, not to further your life, but to drain it.
“For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors – between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.
. . .
“Man’s mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch-or build a cyclotron – without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think.
“But to think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call ‘human nature,’ the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival-so that for you, who are a human being, the question ‘to be or not to be’ is the question ‘to’ think or not to think.’
“A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions. ‘Value’ is that which one acts to gain and keep, ‘virtue’ is the action by which one gains and keeps it. ‘Value’ presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? ‘Value’ presupposes a standard, a purpose and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative. Where there are no alternatives, no values are possible.
“There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence-and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not; it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it does; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.
. . .
“Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice-and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man-by choice; he has to hold his life as a value-by choice: he has to learn to sustain it-by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues-by choice.
“A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.
. . .
“Man’s life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose. If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to man-for the purpose of preserving, fulfilling and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life.
“Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it. A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death. Such a being is a metaphysical monstrosity, struggling to oppose, negate and contradict the fact of his own existence, running blindly amuck on a trail of destruction, capable of nothing but pain.
“Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values. A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation of your happiness – to value the failure of your values-is an insolent negation of morality. A doctrine that gives you, as an ideal, the role of a sacrificial animal seeking slaughter on the altars of others, is giving you death as your standard. By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man-every man-is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.”
Footnotes
(1) Boyzone, “No Matter What”, album “Where We Belong”, 1998, Songwriters: Andrew Lloyd Webber, Jim Steinman, Nigel Wright
(2) Russell, Bertrand; “Science and Ethics,” in Religion and Science, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 230–31.
(3) Harris, Eric; from his website, quoted in The Washington Post, April 29, 1999.
(4) Rand, Ayn, Atlas Shrugged, Signet Centennial edition (April 21, 2005), Penguin Group, ISBN 978-1-101-13719-2. Excerpt from John Galt’s Speech.
