Morality is a subjective concept. This is self-evident and, in my opinion, requires little argument, yet I've seen that morality being objective is a widely-held belief, even among philosophically oriented people -- I'm thinking of Peter Singer, Steven Pinker, Bertrand Russell, Sam Harris, and many more.
By “objective,” I mean that it holds true regardless of what the agent watching or experiencing it believes. The laws of physics are objective, that is, they are true regardless of what someone believes. Vanilla ice cream, on the other hand, depends on the subject's prior experience. Morality is said to be objective if its validity is unaffected by the subject or agent. Slavery, murder, and, rape are all wicked, without exception.
I think the real meaning of these moral statements boils down to the agent’s preferences, instead of a description of reality outside of them. Morality isn’t something that transcends human preferences, but something that’s composedentirely within it. Saying “It’s wrong to spit on the floor” is actually the wrong way to phrase “I prefer that you don’t spit on the floor.” And we’ve been tricked by language into believing false things about reality.
There are some legitimate reasons why this confusion arises, the first of which is that there are objective facts about subjective experiences. If you don’t like vanilla ice cream, then it’s objectively true that you subjectively dislike vanilla ice cream. Similarly, it’s objectively true that you subjectively find slavery, murder, and rape abhorrent. And this experience is probably shared by many people, perhaps the vast majority of us.
And because it’s a widespread, near-universal belief, and because the fact of this experience is objectively true, we make the illegal move of thinking that therefore slavery being wrong is objectively true. We switched from talking about people’s brains and experiences to talking about the world outside of it.
“Right” and “wrong” are concepts we’ve overlayed on top of events and actions that don’t actually exist. It’s just a story we’re telling each other. When Hitler killed Jewish people, what is true to say here is that you don’t want that happening, that you find it detestable, that many people share this experience, and, most importantly, that you don’t want to feel this intense revulsion is merely a subjective feeling without any transcendent reality to it.
You don’t want someone else to come and say that they’re okay with it, and then have to contend with the fact that their preference is no more “true” or “valid” than yours. Because you feel like it’s “obviously wrong,” not something even worth arguing. How can something you feel so deeply and intuitively, and shared by so many others, not be correct?
The answer is that this is just wishful thinking. You’re an agent with strong preferences about whether innocents by the millions should be mercilessly killed, and that’s about it. There’s no law of the universe that tells us anyone shouldn’t do anything. The universe is moot on such notions.
All that is left are people’s preferences, things that they want, that they don’t want, and they project this need into the world and talk as though good and bad and right and wrong are properties of things outside of them, instead of properties of their subjective experience.
Dipendronath Das is a freelance contributor.