Mackie and Kevin and Ben...Oh My! (A re-defense of moral subjectivism)

I have been recently, and pleasantly, surprised by a recent, lengthy post on my friend Ben Hayek's blog with a main subject of...me. (Is there a better subject for an extended essay, I wonder?) Specifically, Ben takes issue with several posts I've made here defending moral subjectivism - the view that moral judgments are subjective preferences rather than objective facts.

Like many objectivists, Ben is quite angered by subjectivism because, without it, we could not make objectively valid moral judgments. The first part of his post suggests a moral dilemma: Ben and I confront a person torturing a cat. Ben, the objectivist, would be able to very objectively condemn the torturer, while I would not.

On Kevin's view, when a subject declares that "torturing kittens for pleasure is immoral," the subject is not identifying a a fact about the world (i.e., not picking out a constituent of objective reality), but rather identifying only a state within the subject's consciousness. Kevin describes this state within the subject as no different to whenever a human being feels an emotion. Thus, if I encountered a sadist on the street about to torture kittens for the pleasure it gives him, if I rescued the kittens by force prior to their fate, I would not be doing so because it is a matter of objective fact that what the kittens were about to be subjected to is objectively wrong, but because I only feel that it would be wrong.

I suppose I am guilty as charged here. Ben is right that I agree with him that torturing kittens is wrong, but that I disagree with him about the objective import of that view. I would, in a sense, be powerless to objectively condemn the sadist.

I am quite at a loss, though, to think about why objectively condemning a sadist would have any more import than subjectively condemning her. Does the sadist care if my condemnation is coming from me or from the Cosmic Objective Order? I doubt it. I doubt a sadist who tortures kittens feels very bound by a moral excoriation - no matter whether it is subjective or objective in nature (whatever the hell the difference looks like.)

And this is one of the big objections I have to moral objectivism; like JL Mackie and others have noted, if morals exist as objective things, they are very strange things - things like no other things we know of. They do not have any physical embodiment or mode of detection (other than an introspective method identical to that used to ascertain subjective emotion!). And they are the only things (assuming they are things) that impose obligations on witnesses' behavior. Facts are real, but I can think of no fact that obligates us to change our behavior like morals do. So, are they facts? I cannot see any good reason to see that they are.

But apparently, Ben does. He suggests that they are facts just as 2+2=4 is a fact. He suggests that just as this mathematical axiom has no basis in observable sense data (but remains a fact nonetheless), so with moral facts. 2+2=4, killing kittens is wrong... pretty similar, eh?

Actually not. 2+2=4 actually does have basis in physical fact and is observable (verifiable, if you will). As numbers are symbols, "2" means ** and "4" means ****. We can verify, then, by using our number system that 2+2=4 is valid by adding ** to ** and seeing whether it equals **** (the representation for "4").

But Ben has upped that ante. He suggests that if I hold that morals are not facts because they are not grounded in the world of observable and testable things, then I have a problem: that very statement (that morals are not facts because not grounded in observable and testable things) is itself not grounded in the observable, testable world. Oh dear!

Of course, Ben's objection misunderstands the burden of proof. Just as he who claims that faeries do not exist does not bear the burden of proof (the affirmer of faeries does), my statement is something of a null hypothesis equivalent to a denial of faeries existence. Just as the faery denier is waiting for proof of so-called objective faeries, I am waiting for proof of so-called objective morals.

And, yes, there is reason to doubt such existence. While Ben is right to say that the fact of moral disagreement is not enough to make the case for moral subjectivism, it does not itself bode well for moral objectivism. Moral disagreement is not just existent, but quite pervasive and often intractable. When two people disagree over whether capitalism is wrong, for instance, they can argue facts (capitalism leads to x, socialism does not lead to x), but the argument often comes down to an impasse (I think x is wrong, and you don't), where one cannot think of any fact-based way to convince the other.

This is not very explainable under moral objectivism other than to say, as Ben does, that " people in general are stupid." This will not do, though, because he who makes that charges must be able to point to - POINT TO - what it is that the dummies are overlooking (and if that something is intuition, I am sure the dummies also have those, in which case, the accuser must argue as to why his is superior to theirs non-circularly).

Lastly, Ben wonders what my criteria for truth is. Unfortunately, this is an area of philosophy I have little patience for. What we mean by "true" appears to be a tautology: "truth" is "that which accurately describes how things are." How do we recognize truth? The only good answer to this I see is: by experiment. If I write out the directions to Sean's house, the best way to test this is to see if the directions actually get us there. If I say that x theory is true in science, the way to test that (unlike what ID creationists do) is to experiment the theory, and try and falsify the theory. If I say, "I love my Fiancee," the only - and imperfect - way to see if that is true is to observe me and see if my actions are consistent or inconsistent with that statement.

But how in the world do we verify "killing cats is wrong." We can verify "killing cats will cause them physical pain." We can verify "I have an aversion to seeing cats inflicted with physical pain." Those are all matters up to perfect or imperfect experiment. But what we cannot verify is the next step: "imposing physical pain is wrong." What does "wrong" refer to? We can't observe it. We can only intuit it (just as we intuit our own subjective emotions, or God talking to us.)

Ben is clearly not satisfied with the idea that to be called "truth" a thing has to be observable. He hints at logic being a falsifier of this claim. I think not. Logic is only so good as the results it leads to, and the only reason we call the law of non-contradiction true is because we test it both empirically and mentally. After all, logic is seen as a tool, and the only truth a tool has is that it does what it says it will do. When we use logic, it leads us to results that work as they say they will (as theories are tested by seeing if they work the way they say they will.)

And as for 2+2=4, it is the same. Its truth comes not from a heavenly mystical Platonic realm that humans cannot see (but can intuit) but from the fact that we can observe ** plus ** equalling ****. So, I am afraid, I hold to the horrible idea that "truth" gets its name from its ability to work in practice.

In the meantime, I'm going to keep on believing concepts that I believe exist in the world, albeit in a transcendental sense of course, such as mathematical truth, logical truth, and moral truth, just like I believe in the thoroughly objective nature of truth in general, along with the believe that they are - all of them - constituents of the world.

Many men intuit God and argue very fervently that He "exist[s] in the world, albeit in a transcendental sense," and that, despite his objective nature, we can't sense him with the five senses. We can only intuit him. Ben has made the case that ethics are like this. But is he persuaded by such religious arguments. (Hint: Ben is not a Christian because, despite God having all the properties Ben argues that morals have, he does not believe that there is evidence for God's existence.)

Hmmm....

The Impossibility of Objective Morality

Every once in a while, I force myself to take seriously the idea that morality, and moral disputes, are a matter of objective fact. I confess that I have never been able to find a good argument for this viewpoint, and while I know that many have been convinced by it, I confess my blindness for how.

The most convincing argument for me against the possibility that morality is about objective fact is the idea that the only "thing" we have to measure the "correctness" of moral statements by is our moral sentiments. Further, there is simply no good reason to suspect, and every reason to reject, that these are objective in nature. In other words, we have no objective moral blueprint to hold up to our moraal judgments to help us know whether they are correct. We only have our individual sentiments on the matter, which seem far from being objective.

To put the matter concretely, when two or more people disagree on a scientific proposition or conjecture, experiments can be performed (and it is quite hard to deny that the world these experiments are performed in is not objective). Competing theories will stand or fall based on their results in experiment against an objective world, results that are independent of anyone's wishes or desires.

Contrast that with disagreement over moral matters. When two people disagree on moral matters - one says x is right and the other, that x is wrong - there is nothing resemblinng the objective world - a world of moral fact- that we can hold the competing judgments up to. IN order to know whether x is REALLY right or wrong, we would have to have access to the world of moral facts, so that we can find out which proclamation that world endorses. So far as we can tell, there is no such world of moral facts (and when people say there is, they are generally getting there by intution, begging the question of how objective those intutions really are.)

Some diagree with this; they suggest that there IS a factual resolution to moral disputes. When I say x is wrong and you say x is right, some say that we can experiment. Per Hume's is/ought dichotomy, it is a different thing to say, "x causes suffering," than it is to say, "x is wrong." That x may cause suffering is an observable fact. That x is wrong expresses more than that x causes suffering, but goes further by inserting a value judgment that suffering is wrong. As good as that may sound, there is no objective way to prove the latter as there is the former. This is precisely because "x causes suffering," can be validated solely by appealing to the objective world of descriptive fact. That x is wrong is unprovable because it goes beyond the brute world of descriptive fact.

I confess that I cannot see how to get around this. The arguments I've heard seem to mistake the speaker's strong intuitional moral sense for an objective world of moral facts. And to me, there seems no good reason to suppose that these intuitions are anything more than psychological preferences (that we mistake solely becuase they are so strong that they SEEM to be obvious to everyone).

I have tried and tried to "get into the belief" and understand how one can believe in an objective morality, but there seem too many problems to make such a belief worthwhile. How can moral disagreements be resolved similarly to the objective resolutions in science? Where are the incontestible proofs of some moral propositions over others? How can "is" (recognition of fact) lead inexoribly to "ought (a prescriptive obligation)?

What is Moral Subjectivism?

On another website, a reader asked: ""Still can anyone here give a decent and concise version of sophisticated moral subjectivism to be addressed?"

This was my best response:

am not sure how "sophisticated" it is, but let me try.

I see moral subjectivism the way JL Mackie did: it is the negation of moral objectivism. Morals are not properties of the "out there" world and, as such, they are properties of the subject's mental world.

Put further, we may feel or think certain things to be right and good, but we are in error if we think there is any objective reason compelling others to see it the same way. No matter how knock down or drag out our argument is for the rightness of a particlar thing, that argument will always be our opinion of the mattter, not objective fact.

Subjectivists are not, as David seems to be getting at, nihilists. We have as strong ideas about moral oughts as anyone else, and we judge others and ourselves by standards. We also try to convince others to see things morally as we do.

What subjectivists can't do, though, is to think that any moral system - even our own - has necessary import beyond our own subjective minds. We may wish it were different, but in the absence of any great suggestion on how to detect the moral properties that some allege exist in the world, we see morality as a product of individual subjects making individual judgments.

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People have a big problem with subjectivism. How, we think, can our strong convictions that pedophilia, murder, homosexuality, bestaility, theft, etc, are simply subjective opinion statements? They feel like more; we want them to be more. We want them to be truths binding on all and all alike, and we want those who disagree with us not simply to be of differing opinion, but to be WRONG.

Heck, even I - a subjectivist - would rather subjectivism be false. Subjectivism is boring, as subjectivism has nothing positive to say in ethics or morals. The only benefit to being a subjectivist is that it allows me to be a pluralist and avoid dogmaatism. But still, I would rather believe that there were definitive rights and wrongs that transcended individual subjective judgment.

The problem is that there is really no evidence for objective morality. As JL Mackie wrote, we do not have any reason to believe that "goodness" is a property in the world and do not even know what such a property would be like (do we see it, smell it, hear it, feel it, or taste it?) Nor does it make sense to say that "good," "bad," "right" and "wrong" are objective terms, in the face of so much disgareement about (a) what they mean, and (b) concrete moral quesitons (is abortion good?).

Further, we know that "good" and "bad" are valuative terms much like "hot" and "cold." Like "hot" and "cold" (or "beautiful" or "ugly") these terms are vaguely descriptive. (We all know what is meant when we say that a song was ugly or say that the beverage is hot.) But we also know that there is no objective standard for what is "hot" or "cold" (my "hot" may be your "lukewarm" and her "cold" with none of us being objectively right or wrong.)

Subjective morality is this kind of view. Even if we all kind of know what is meant by saying things like "Johny did something very bad," or "Jenny is a good human being," there seemingly exists no objective standard - true for all - by which to judge what is good and bad. (And like terms dealing with termpurature, subjectivists see moral terms as often having fuzzy borders).

So, while being a moral subjectivist may confine me to never having the satisfaction of knowing that I am objectively right in my moral judgments, until I hear some good arguments as to where we can find moral qualities in the "out there" universe, I have to remain a subjectivist.

Problem With Utilitarianism

If someone asked me what my moral views are, I would probably call myself a rule utilitarian. To quote from Wikipedia's concise definition, I believe that "that moral actions are those which conform to the rules which lead to the greatest good, or that "the rightness or wrongness of a particular action is a function of the correctness of the rule of which it is an instance."

Even though I take a utilitarian view myself, I have a problem with utilitarianism, even of "rule utilitarianism," - at some point, utilitarians, who believe that moral actions are those that tend to maximize x )(happiness, fulfillment of desires, etc), will be asked to justify the utilitarianism itself. ("Why should we want to maximize x rather than y or z?") At that point, the utilitarian will either (a) have to justify their utilitarianism with some moral argument not itself utilitarian; (b) justify their utilitarianism with utililtarian reasoning; or (c) suggest that utilitarianism cannot justify maximizing x over y or z. (a) and (c) would render utilitarianism too flimsy by admitting that utilltarianism itself is not sufficient to account for all of the moral universe (which is important because once this is acknowledged, we have to question whether "the good" can be defined as "that which maximizes x" as there must now exist something "good (x) which does not derive its goodness from "its ability to maximize x." (b) would make utilitarianism troublingly circular, as justifying x by suggesting that "it effectively maximizes x" does nothing to answer the question "why justify x."

As I feel like the preceeding chapter contained too much philosophical jibberish, let me illustrate the point by rehashing a recent discussion on the atheist ethicist blog.

Its author, Alonzo Fyfe, is an advocate of desire utilitarianism, where moral action is defined as "that action which tends to fulfill desires." In his words, " A good desire is desire that tends to fulfill other desires." Conversely, a desire is not good when it tends to thwart other desires.

The desire utilitarian does not measure utility exclusively in terms of pleasure, happiness, well being, or preference satisfaction. Desire utilitarians say that the good is found in all of the things that we desire. It is found in happiness to the degree that we desire happiness, and it is found in pleasure to the degree that we desire pleasure. It is found in the company of family to the degree that we desire the company of family. All value exists in the form of desire fulfillment.

Aside from some problems I have with this style of utilitarianism (it is impossibly vague, malleable, and, at root, way more subjective and psychologistic than it aspires to be), it is question begging (as all forms of utilitarianism are). "Why is fulfilling desires considered "good"?"
Desire utilitarians could go for strategy (a), (b) or (c) above.

(a) "Fulfilling desires is "good" because fulfilling desires is what makes people happy and what makes people happy is good."

This is no good, because it tacitly admits that "good" is not defined by "ability to fulfill other desires. Therefore, it negates the desire utilitarians' claims "good" is defined in utilitarian terms.

(b) Fulfilling desires is "good" because fulfilling desires leads to fulfilling desires, which is "good."

While this option is the only one that stays "in bounds" of desire utilitarianism, the above answer is nonsensical because it is whoppingly circular. Further, it does not answer the question of why fulfilling desires is good (but only pushes the problem back a step.)

(c) Utilitarianism lacks the abillity to justify fulfilling desire (over some other variable) as the ultimate good on its own terms.

This seems to me the most honest answer. Utilitarianism always suggests that "good" is synonymous with "that which maximizes x" but cannot justify this as an ultimate valule on utilitarian grounds without being meaninglessly circular.


So why would I consider myself a rule utilitarian? I think that that moral actions are those which, if everyone acted the same way, would maximize liberty to pursuse their own happiness (within non-coercive bounds). But how can I justify my desire to see liberty to pursue happiness maximized?

I certainly cannot do it on utilitarian grounds (as liberty does nothing to maximize others' liberty). Like liberal pluralist William Galston, I throw up my hands and suggest that liberty is to be valued as a good simply becuase, if I had to guess, I would suppose that most people value liberty and would want to avoid coercion as much as possible.

Put differently, I am a rule utilitarian because I think that the best way to explain the morality of not stealing from others, helping others, and obeying traffic laws is that, the more people who do these things, the more liberty we and others will get to enjoy. While we sometimes have to do things (follow traffic laws, refrain from killing our bosses), the best reason to do these things - what makse them "good" - is that living in a world where there are traffic laws and rules against murdering bosses is more conducive to liberty than ones that are not.

Still, utilitarianism's fundamental flaw is that it, by itself, will always be incapable of justifying its particlar vision of what to maximize ("the good is what maximises fulfillment of desires,"). It will always have to resort to some extra-utilitarian justification somewhere along the way, lest it become viciously circular.

Ayn Rand, Tibor Machan, and Their Mistaken Defense of Objective Morality

Like many others, I first got hooked on philosophy by reading Ayn Rand. Also, like many, there came a time when I started reading other phiosophers. Therefore - again, like many - there was a time when I realized that Rand got just about everything wrong in her philosophizing. In particular, Rand had a habit of claiming that she had solved a vexing philosophic problem generally by vastly oversimplifying, if not getting wrong, a problem only to "solve" something different than the actual problem.

Recently, I have been reading essays in a colleciton called The Promise of Liberty by a follower of Rand's, Tibor Machan. In reading his first essay, which defends Rand's defense of ethical objectivism, I have re-realized how wrong her solution is, and how, as usual, she even got the question wrong.

As PoL is still in press, I am not going to quote from it, but rather from Rand's own essay "The Objectivist Ethics". machan does not really add to or expand to Rand's unfortunate defense, but only restates it with the intention of clarifying it.

In short, Rand and Machan's argument is that ethics are objective because ethical judgments are made with the aid of facts. Once one chooses to live ones life, certain values inexorably follow from that: we ought to seek food, shelter, that which will promote our flourishing, etc.

An organism’s life depends on two factors: the material or fuel which it needs from the outside, from its physical background, and the action of its own body, the action of using that fuel properly. What standard determines what is proper in this context? The standard is the organism’s life, or: that which is required for the organism’s survival.

Al;ready, though, Rand has misunderstood the dispute between objectivists and subjectivists. Quite honestly, what is at dispute is not whether values and moral judgments are (or should be) made in reference to facts, but what the nature of moral norms are. Subjectivists argue that moral norms are come to by subjects, not by some quality inherent in objects. The echo famous subjectivist JL Mackie, for morality to be objective requires that morals have some subject-independent existence in the world.

In fact, Rand's view is completely comapatible with a subjectivist account of morality. Subjectivists can easily, and without contradiction, suggest that moral judgments should - or must! - be made in the face of actual subject-independent facts, so long as the judgments being made are made by individual subjects. All that is required for subjectivism is the acknowledgement that judgments are made by the subjects and are not a pre-existing imperative that we happen to "come across" existing in the world independent of our minds.

The next question is whether Rand or Machan have done enough to show that an objective morality is possible. Life may be the "ultimate value" that undergirds all other values, but is that one value enough to give us any obvious answers to any but the most pedestrian moral questions?

Since reason is man’s basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil.

Before going on, I want the reader to pause and notice the subtle "no true scotsman" fallacy going on here. "[t]hat which is proper to the life of a RATIONAL being is good..." By framing it this way, Rand can easily say that x is an objective value. When one point out that more people choose y than x (a possible reason to suppose that x is not an objective value), Rand can simply dismiss them all by saying that they are not rational, and if they were, they'd choose x. Like the "no true scotsman" fallacy, one cannot win with this set up becuase Rand's caveat - "rational" - has rigged the game!

Beyond that, though, Rand once again demonstrates obliviousness to philosophers and ideas that she full well should have known about: in this case, GE Moore, author of Principia Ethica. If she had been aware of Moore's work - what ethical philosopher wasn't?! - she would have realized the need to show how this "equation" was not a violation of the naturalistic fallacy.

Moore's idea was simple; efforts to equate the terms "good" or "bad" with any demarcatioin principle - utility, survival, pleasure - was invalid and we can see this by realizing that our intuitions understand that "good" and x (pick any criteria) are two different things. "Good" is not a direct synonym for happiness (there are good things that don't make us happy), or, in Rand's case, survival (there are many things that don't enhance our survival that accord with our intuition of what is good).

By way of example, Machan's article mentions more than once a moral obligation to be generous. He mentions is as if to imply that choosing to live inexorably entails this obligation to be generous. He does not explain how this is, and I have serious doubts that any attempts to do so would not be very, very erroneous. I am all for generosity, but it is easy to think of a dozen examples of sceanrios where my survival is impeded or harmed by generosity. More straightforward, A person could certainly argue that being generous has social utility and CAN be personally beneficial (via game theory, say) but such argujments would tend to be utilitarian (or rule-utillitarian) in nature, and I am left mystified as to any plausible argumenst that the choice to live necessarily entails an obligation towards generosity (particularly for egoists like Rand and Machan).

Another example of this blunder can be seen when Rand tries to justify the objective (not subjective) value of productiveness.

The virtue of Productiveness is the recognition of the fact that productive work is the process by which man’s mind sustains his life, the process that sets man free of the necessity to adjust himself to his background, as all animals do, and gives him the power to adjust his background to himself.

To Rand, this value is objective in the sense that it is the "central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values." To choose non-productiveness is, in essence, to act against the ultimate value of life and thus the objectively wrong choice.

To be honest, this is the type of rhetoric that I and many others got hooked on when we got hooked on Rand. Now, when I read those words, it is hard to see how, because as stirring as they are, they are wrong. While one can argue that produciveness is a life-sustaining virtue, it is certainly not objectively the only choice. One can - and many have - sustained their lives by freeloading off of people. Also, productiveness is no guarantor of sustaining one's life. Eithe way, to argue that productiveness is an objective value by reference to its utility in sustaining life is hollow, as it is neither a necessary or sufficient condition for sustaining life.

Like all of the other values that Rand defeds - egoism, capitalism, generosity, rationality, etc. - productiveness is a contingent and subjective value choice. One can choose it, but there is nothing compelling us to do so. Rand and Machan would object that the facts of life comepel values like productiveness and generosity, but any anthropologist or sociologist can easily demonstrate that there are a plurality of ways to answer moral questions consistent with sustaining, and flourishing in, life.

There are many other points that could be brought up, but I think I have done enough to show that Rand came nowhere close to solving the problem of moral objectivism v. subjectivism. The fact that she was so confident that she did, and that Machan is confident enough not to heavily modify and reconfigure her arguments, is testimony of the insularity that has and does plague the objectivist "movement."

Error Theory: A Brief Defense Based on Moral Psychology

For many years, I have been entranced with the puzzle that is quintessential to meta-ethical philosophy: are moral values in any way objective and absolute? if so, how do we know, and if not, why do they often feel as if they are?

After much graduate-school (and beyond) deliberation, the "solution" I have been most comfortable with is that of error theory. In a nutshell, error theory tells us that moral values are subjective and relative (rather tahn objective and absolute), and that we easily fall into error because they are felt so strongly as to appear objective. The most famous expounder of error theory (I think, the pioneer of the name) was JL Mackie, though shades of error theory can be found in earlier philosophers like Bertrand Russell, William James, and David Hume.

As error theory is a form of relativism, it is best to briefly justify relativism and only then, bring up reasons why error theory is the best explanation of our moral climate.

Why am I a relativist? Before even getting into meaty philosophical argument, I am a relativist because of the very existence of widespread moral disagreement. Moral objectivists argue that for ethical questions, there exists one right answer (whether it is discoverable by reason or an intuitive moral sense that we all share). Were this true, then the only explanation for the fact of widespread moral disagreement on issues would be that only some of us are attuned enough (in reason or intuition) to recognize the right answer. (Generally, when moral objectivists are presented with the fact of moral disagreement, their answer to it IS in fact to poinit out that those who do not arrive at a particular answer are simply wrong).

While I guess this is plausible, there is a better solution: that there often exists more than one possible "right" answer to a question (pluralism) or, further still, that the very idea of what the "right" answer is, is a question that each individual judges for themselves based on their own sentiments, experience, and reasonings.

Why go for relativism over pluralism? This is where we get into moral psychology. I am a relativist because, as an epistemic fact, each of us has direct mental access only to our own brains. In addition, as best as we can tell, none of us has direct access to any "ethical plain" that exists outside of our brains. In some sense, this is what led to JL Mackie's idea, that undergirds error theory, called The Argument
From Queerness. The Argument from Queerness states that ethical propositions cannot be metaphysically "out there" in the world because they do not in any way appear to be natural properties. Moral debates are not like debates over concretes, as we cannot "point to" in order to show that a moral act is inherently right or wrong.

Moral objectivists will tend to reply that this is a scientism of the type which says that nothing exists which is not concrete. In a sense, they are correct. For someone to say that morality exists objectively would mean that they need to show how moral disputes can be objectively (rather than subjectively) resolved; what can be pointed to that is outside of the arguer's own moral sentiments that can prove to someone with different moral sentiments that "x is true." Often, the only avenue for the objectivist here is to suggset that "good" is an obvious quality (like "red" or "hot"). Here, it is easily pointed out that, unlike "red" and "hot," "good" cannot be experienced with any of the five senses, but rather "felt" with the moral intuition (bringing me back to the same suspicion that "good" and "bad" are judgments made differently by different people's intutions).

In the absence of any really good reason to see moral judgments as anything but subjective appraisals, or accompoanying arguments that human mind has some sort of direct access to anything outside of its own thoughts, I see no good choice but to suspect that subjective relativism is the most accurate description of how things are.

But why is this so hard for people to accept? Even though relativism seesm the most logical description, it is hard to actually be a moral subjectivist/relativist but in theory. We hold moral precepts very strongly and it is hard to think that they are simply subjective preferences. When I say that slavery, sodomy, murder, rape, etc., are wrong, I feel like they really are wrong and not just that I think them wrong.

This is why I think that error theory - the idea that, at times, our psychological natures make us experience our own preferences so strongly that it is impossible to imagine that they are not objective - is the best description of how things really are. Imagine the best piece of music you have ever heard in your entire life. At the apex of its enjoyment, isn't it just well nigh impossible to imagine that some people might derive no pleasure from it at all? Another common example is our senses of humor. It is probably tempting to suggest that those who do not laugh at the funniest joke you have ever heard are those who "have no sense of humor," rather than simply not sharing your sense of humor.

That is the way, I think, human psychology often works. When we deeply feel certain preferences, our brain presents these to us not as prefernces, but as imperatives that simply are (inependently of us feeling or thinking them so).

So, we can either see moral disagreement as a sign that some people are simply not good at moral reasoning or reading their moral intuitions (leading them into wrong answers), or suspect that people differ in moral sentiments becuase, like aesthetic sentiments, moral sentiments are not objective. We can either suggest that the reason people feel strongly about their moral opinions is because these opinions are objective (while ignoring that even "wrong" opinons are felt as strongly as "right" ones), or we can suspect that human psychology often "tricks" us into feeling sentiments so strongly that they appear, but are not, objective.

Quite simply, I think the latter options - subjective relativism and error theory - are the best interpretation of the facts of our moral universe.

Are There Objective Criteria for Evaluating Art?

A friend of mine, Benjamin Hayek, and I are engaged in a discussion on his blog. One of the side issues brought up there is whether or not there are objective standards for evaluating art (or anything for that matter.) Ben believes there are objective rights and wrongs in terms of evaluating art. I don't. So as not to sidetrack the debate on his blog by exploring this side issue there, I will say something on it here.

On the blog, he writes: "Indeed, I believe that it is almost always an easy task to weight one peice of art against another, such as deciding the value of Jacques-Lious David's The Death of Socrates (1787) (which is one of my very favorites) vs. Andres Serrano's award-winning Piss Christ (1987), or comparing the complete works of Smetana to those of Snoop-Dogg. There is good art and bad art."

Of course, he does not go on to outlay the objectively correct criteria for judging Smetana superior to Snoop Dog or The Death of Socrates superior to Piss Christ. And if he did, my suggestion would be that those are simply the criteria he prefers. Two people disagreeing on art are most likely the result of (a) the two people chossing different critieria to judge the competing works by; or (b) the two people agreeing on the same critieria to look at but disagreeing as a matter of taste about who meets the criteria more.

Let me give an example here. Benjamin's musician of choice is Smetana. My musician of choice (if I have to name just one!) is Esbjorn Svensson, the recently decesased jazz pianist from Sweden.

Now the music of Smetana and Svennson are quite, quite different. Smetana's music is a very Slovakian flavored romantic concert music with a lot of heavy string orchestration, meandering melodies and lush exploration. Svensson is very multi-dimensional jazz drawing on bebop, electronic, and minimalistic influences - terse and frequently-repeating melodies, sparse melody lines, and no real "orchestration" to speak of.

Now, I am not sure how in the world Ben and I, when disagreeing over the superior musician or works, could come up with any type of objective criteria for adjudicating. In fact, the two styles of music are so completely different that it is difficult to figure out what their commonalities are aside from being performed in a Western 12 note scale.

But even if we chose music that is more similar (I will now pick Allen Hovhaness to his Smetana so that both are in the classical orchestrative tradition), Ben and I will doubtless disagree on the criteria for choosing who is superior. Hovhaness is shamelessly tonal, avoids modulation quite studiously, very Eastern in influence, and - many would say - boringly minimalistic. Smetana is very much the opposite of all of these.

Quite simply, I think the best we can do is judge one of the other superior BY CHOOSING A CRITIERIA SET ARBITRARILY and sticking to it. But it must be acknowledged that in music, or any art, there are too many criteria one can judge by to think that one criterion or set of criteria is the default best one to go with.

I think the fact that Ben says it is "an easy task" to weigh one against the other means that, when only he is doing the judging, it is easy to agree with himself that Smetana is better than Snoop Dog. Were he to have to defend his choice to a hip hop connoiseur, and he would quickly realize how non-easy the task is, and in turn, how relative his criteria for decision was.