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Ethical Subjectivism
Is Morality Relative to Individuals?

Ethical or moral subjectivism is not simply the view that

different people have different moral duties. That is a
truism. I do not have a duty to pay your credit card bill;
you do. You do not have a duty see that my daughter
gets to school on time; I do. No one, not even a moral
objectivist, will deny that different people have different
moral obligations.

What moral objectivists

hold is that morality
treats all people equally. No one, according to moral
objectivism, has different duties simply because of who
they are. If one person in one situation has a particular
duty, then, according to moral objectivism, anyone else in
a relevantly similar situation has the same duty. It is the
situation, and not the person in the situation, that fixes
the moral facts.

Ethical subjectivism, then, holds not just that different

people have different moral duties, but that different
people in relevantly similar situations have different moral
duties. To put it another way, ethical subjectivism holds
that a full description of all of the morally relevant
features of a situation will make reference to who it is that
is in that situation. The objective features of the situation
alone do not fix the moral facts.
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