H2 Knowledge and Inquiry — Subjectivity in Morality (27/30)

Long Passage [RI Y6 CT 2023] The author’s main conclusion is that morality is subjective. He first establishes a dichotomy: morality is either objective or subjective. Upon this basis, he considers three possible ways of showing that morality is objective before refuting each of them: (1) examining the consequences of both positions, (2) appealing to scientific authority, and (3) appealing to religious authority. From this, the author concludes that since all of these ways of proving morality is objective fail, morality cannot be objective and must therefore be subjective. Overall, while the author offers some compelling reasons why appealing to science or religion do not adequately show morality is objective, his argument relies on a flawed inductive leap from not being able to show morality is objective to morality necessarily being subjective, rendering his eventual conclusion unpersuasive. The author first examines if consequentialist arguments can show the objectivity of morality, and concludes that this is not possible. He argues that if morality is objective, this would lead to harmful ethnocentrism that creates discriminatory practices, but if morality is subjective, then morality would end up disconnected from the real world and, by extension, useless. This particular line of reasoning does not lead to the conclusion he intends; by examining the undesirable consequences of both objective and subjective conceptions of morality, he has shown not that consequentialist arguments are untenable, but that the positions on morality themselves (as objective or subjective) are untenable. In fact, the argument appears to be internally contradictory: if it is true that consequentialist arguments cannot justify claims on the ontological status of moral facts, then his consequentialist line of reasoning would not be able to demonstrate anything about these two metaethical positions. However, a charitable reading of his argument could be that examining consequences leads to an impasse, since both objective and subjective conceptions of morality are seemingly untenable, making consequentialist arguments not helpful in our attempts to determine which conception is preferred. I would accept this line of reasoning, but it would still not justify his eventual conclusion that morality is subjective, because of the very consequentialist problems with the position he identifies. As such, this particular

reason — while it may show that morality might not be objective based on a charitable reading — does not justify his overall argument about the subjectivity of morality. His second reason why morality cannot be shown to be objective is more compelling — he argues that scientific appeals fail because scientific consensus can change over time as new evidence emerges. This is true, since we have seen numerous paradigm shifts in science that ostensibly cast doubt on the certainty of findings — Newtonian mechanics, which had been accepted for over 3 centuries, was