Moral Relativism (With a Focus on Moral Subjectivism)

Moral relativism is a meta-ethical theory which asserts that morality is relative on the subject, whether the
subject refers to society or the individual. Morality as ultimately dependent on the individual is the claim of
moral subjectivism while morality being ultimately dependent on society is called moral
conventionalism. As the term relative implies, moral relativism states that the nature of morality which
include moral principles, laws and prohibitions, is relative to either the perspective of the individual or the
society of which the individual is a part. To make this clear, think of two people who have different tastes on
music. One loves rap music while the other does not find anything aesthetically appealing to it. Now, it
seems futile for these two to debate the beauty of rap music because it’s the kind of issue where two
people can disagree and yet still be reasonable to hold each of their separate views to be true and even
granting that the other person is justified in holding his. This is a disagreement of taste, which is the same
when people disagree about foods, movies or TV shows. I know some people who are obsessed with Star
Wars while I don’t find anything appealing with it. This does not mean that I am right and they are wrong. In
this case, we are both justified to hold our different views. We just have different tastes of what good movie
is supposed to be. What makes a movie good is relative to the person watching it.

The moral relativist claims just the same, but applying this relativity to morals. Just as people legitimately
disagree about what TV shows are worth watching because people have different tastes, people disagree
about what actions count as right or wrong because people (and societies) have different needs, desires,
goals and temperament.

Moral Subjectivism

Why think that morality is dependent on the individual? There is some appeal to the notion that morality, our
ideas of right and wrong, depends on the person talking. After all, it’s not uncommon to hear people saying,
“it’s wrong for you but not for me,” implying that the nature of right and wrong depends on the caprice of
any individual, and so we cannot impose our own moral opinions to others. We want to question the
truthfulness of this proposition but it seems that it’s not easy how we should proceed. This difficulty leads
some people to conclude that there really is no objective moral fact that we can all know or discern but it
depends solely on the individual. The moral subjectivist may as well say that morality is in the eye of the
beholder. What may be wrong for you may be ok for me – end of discussion. The following arguments
below are usually given in support of this theory.

a) Argument from Moral Disagreements – The moral sphere is one aspect of human life where issues
do not seem possible to have a final verdict. People disagree about many moral issues. Some people
think that the use of contraceptives is morally justified, others think it’s not. Many people think that
death penalty is tantamount to murder even if the killing is done by the state while others think that it
can be morally justified. We can go on and on and it seems we won’t find an ethical issue where people
have unanimously agreed about its rightness or wrongness. There always seem to have people on
both opposing sides of the pole. One striking insight about it is that moral disagreements are not like
disagreements about everyday matters, like factual or scientific issues. People can disagree whether
 politician A will run for mayor this coming election. However this disagreement can easily be resolved
by looking at the facts. If politician A already expressed his desire to run or has filed his candidacy, then
that settles the issue. Factual disagreements are resolved by simply looking at and cross-checking the
facts. However, many disagreements in morality do not seem to work that way. Facts may enlighten a
moral issue but they don’t necessarily adjudicate what makes moral or immoral. Because of these
seemingly intractable disagreements in morality, moral relativists use such disagreements to argue that
morality is relative to the individual. Man is the measure of all things, Pythagoras has said, and that
includes morality, according to the moral subjectivist.
b) Argument from Queerness – Although most people wouldn’t find anything weird about the nature of
right and wrong, some philosophers disagree.1 This disagreement will be clear upon deeper
examination. Unlike empirical facts, moral facts if there are such things do not seem to be capable of
being empirically observed. Anyone can perceive trees, tables, cellular phones and shoes. Nobody
serious enough would doubt the existence of such things (except the absolute skeptic who is being
inconsistent anyway). But it seems that rightness and wrongness do not seem to exist in that same
way. We don’t perceive the wrongness or rightness in the same way that our five senses perceive
material objects in our universe. Without God to be the transcendent immaterial ground, objective
moral facts would be queer to exist in a purely material world such as ours. Indeed, how can a purely
naturalistic world give rise to objective values such as right and wrong? John Mackie, who is the major
proponent of this argument, is known to be an ardent and vocal atheist. Since there is no God in
Mackie’s view, morality is indeed queer, and thus no more objective as our subjective desires. It
therefore comes as no surprise that as the title of his book suggests: we don’t discover morality but
rather invent it.
c) Argument from the Relativity of Truth – The last one is inspired by the postmodern slogan that relies
on the relativity of truth. The postmodern idea is that there is no such thing as an objective truth. All
truth is relative, and that includes moral truths. Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the postmodern fathers,
defended this kind of view about truth. He is famous for saying that there is no truth, only interpretation.
The fact that people can have different, even opposing, interpretations of the same document, book,
principle or statement seem to strengthen the plausibility that truth, indeed, is relative. It is relative to
the person who is doing the interpreting. Take the Bible for example. Why are there so many sects
within Christianity? One reason is that people diverge as to how the Bible should be interpreted. People
disagree about the correct way of interpreting Bible’s books or passages. Protestants and Catholics
even disagree about what books should be included or removed from the Canon (the term for the
official books that should be included in the Bible.) The moral relativist will use this fact among many
others as a proof that there is no objective truth, only interpretations. Indeed, if there is an objective
truth about morality, it should have been discovered by now so that people no longer has to argue
about the morality of death penalty, contraceptives, pornography or capitalism. Thus, if there is no
objective truth, then it follows that there is also no such thing as objective morality. And if morality is not
objective, then it is likely to be subjective.

Answering Moral Subjectivism

1
J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Penguin Books, 1977).
Are the arguments for moral subjectivism sound? Do they powerfully establish the truth of this controversial
ethical theory? Let us turn to the first argument.

Response to the Argument from Moral Disagreements: Do disagreements prove that there is no truth about
the matter? It does not necessarily follow. Just because there are heated disagreement in an area does not
follow that there is no truth about the matter. In fact, people continue the dialogue even if people disagree
because it is assumed that there is truth about the matter. In fact, if we try to distinguish between three
different kinds of moral disagreements, we will realize that some of them are by nature resolvable. The first
kind of disagreement about morality is factual disagreement pertaining to a moral issue. This means
that both sides of the issue disagree about the empirical facts of the matter. Consider this disagreement
about death penalty: a proponent of death penalty argues that it is morally justified since it serves as a
successful deterrent to potential criminals while a critic of death penalty argues that it is not a successful
deterrent. Clearly, this is a disagreement about the facts regarding the moral issue of death penalty. As has
been discussed before, this can be resolved easily by discovering the relevant facts. If both sides of the
debate eventually, agree that a certain fact holds (for instance, that death penalty has significantly deterred
crime), the disagreement is easily resolved.

A second kind of moral disagreement is meaning disagreement pertaining to a moral issue wherein
both parties are discussing a certain moral issue and the debate centers around what is the correct
meaning of a term. There are many debates in ethics that revolve around what the correct meaning of a
particular term is: terms such as justice, equality, tolerance, love, to name a few. Consider the idea of
marriage. For a long time, marriage has been long understood as a union between a man and a woman for
the preservation and perpetuation of the nuclear family. However, many are now enamored by the idea that
marriage can be between two persons, regardless of their sex. The disagreement here is one of meaning:
what does marriage really mean? Is the traditional understanding of marriage defensible, or should its
meaning be expanded to include same-sex relationships? Now, each side may stick with their
understanding of a term in which case, a resolution is unlikely to instantly take place. The most illuminating
way is to identify the sufficient and necessary conditions of a concept like marriage that would be internally
coherent, immune from counter-examples, and will be both agreed upon by both parties. So while this kind
of disagreement is difficult to resolve, there is a way out of such disagreements.

Finally, the hardest kind of moral disagreement to resolve is value disagreements. Most of the
disagreements of this kind agree with the relevant facts and meanings of terms that pertain to a certain
moral issue. Consider the ethical issue of eating animals. There is moral omnivorism on the one hand,
which is a family of views defending the morality of eating animals and there is moral veganism on the
other, which is a family of views arguing for the moral indefensibility of animal eating. Consider for instance
someone on the side of moral omnivorism finding the taste of eating animals to be more valuable than the
value of avoiding the harm animals experience for being killed for food. In fact, there is an article in the
literature that has a line of argument to the effect that taste considerations should matter in the debate on
whether or not we should eat animals, but that’s another story.2 On the other hand, there are those on the

2
Jean Kazez, “The taste question in animal ethics” in Journal of Applied Philosophy 35:4 (2018):661-674.
side of moral veganism who find that avoiding the harm animals experience is more valuable than the mere
pleasure of eating them. Both sides may find their set of values as reflective of what really matters but it
seems that they cannot both be right. Thus, there is not yet a definitive way that has been discovered to
settle this kind of disputes. What is important to note however is that not every form of moral disagreement
is incapable of being resolved.

In any case, the assumption that moral disagreements prove that there is no objective morality is deeply
mistaken. For instance, let us say that three friends are disagreeing about the personality of a famous
actress. It would not help if an intruder interrupts and closes the issue by saying that because they are
disagreeing about the actor’s personality, the best explanation is that there is no actor in the first place.
Imagine how these three people would be flabbergasted by such a claim. Indeed, disagreement about X
does nothing to prove the nonexistence of X. There are disagreements in law, sciences and policymaking.
In fact, in every field of inquiry, as long as there are two separate minds, it is bound to have disagreeing
views about it. This is not to deny the difficult task of resolving moral disagreements. This is simply to prove
that disagreements about morality do not necessarily lead to one affirming that there is no objective
morality and that moral subjectivism is true.

Response to the Argument from Queerness: How about the seemingly weird nature of moral facts, as
observed by Mackie? We agree with Mackie that we do not see moral facts as if they are physical objects
existing in space and time. We affirm their existence but their nature is that they are immaterial and is thus
not part of the spatiotemporal universe. We may even agree with Mackie that it is hard to comprehend the
actual objective existence of such facts if they are not amenable to the senses. But does this imply that
they are not true or nonexistent? Hardly. In fact, if we can find some things that we believe to be true, then
we have already defanged Mackie’s argument. In fact, there are good candidates for similar entities, and
they would be numbers. Think about it: they exist in such a way that they are independent of human
opinions. There is already one universe, one solar system, one earth, on which we live that existed billions
of years before the first homo sapiens came on the scene. Although some may claim that mathematics is
just an invention of the human mind, this idea is hard to fathom. We don’t invent numbers the way that
humans have invented cellular phones, helmets and refrigerators. Inventors can change, improve and
modify their inventions to suit different need and desires. We can’t suddenly make 2 + 2 equal to 5 just
because we want it to be that way. No amount of willpower will change these basic rules of mathematics.
The nature of numbers is such that they are universal and objective but nevertheless real. We can think of
morality in much the same way. Just because we don’t empirically see the “rightness” in charity or the
“wrongness” in oppression doesn’t follow that the rightness and wrongness of these acts aren’t real.

Response to the Argument from the Relativity of Truth: Finally, how should we respond to the moral
subjectivist who uses the relativity of truth to argue for the relativity of morality? In one simple way: by using
his claim to argue against him. For those who assert that there is no objective truth, you should simply ask
them: is that objectively true? The question puts the arguer in an uncomfortable dilemma. If he answers
yes, then that defeats his claim that there is no objective truth since he is claiming that the statement “there
is no objective truth” is objectively true. If he answers no, then we have no reason to believe his claim since
it is found to be not objectively true. Either way, the option is unacceptable. The same can be leveled
against the claim that truth is relative. We can simply ask: is that a relative truth? Again, the same dilemma
and unacceptable consequences apply. With regards to Nietzsche’s claim about everything being
interpretation and not truth, then we can respectfully ask the German philosopher: is that claim true or is it
just your interpretation of truth? Such postmodern claims about truth are commonly known to be
self-defeating statements, or if you want a more technical term, self-referentially incoherent propositions.
In other words, they are statements that can’t live up to the standard that those statements itself set. It is
like someone saying “Hindi ko kayang magsalita ng Tagalog,” or “My brother is an only child.”