Is Right and Wrong Up to the Individual?
Picture a high school where it’s simply accepted that men knock women around to keep them in line. The boys think that’s what makes a man a man. The girls have been raised to believe it too. You look at all of it and think it’s monstrous, so you spend your time trying to put a stop to it.
Now here’s the strange result. On cultural relativism, the abusers are the good guys and you’re the one in the wrong. You’re the deviant standing against what your culture approves of. That’s a hard pill to swallow, and it’s exactly the kind of case that drives people toward a different theory. If the crowd can be this rotten, maybe morality shouldn’t be set by the crowd at all. Maybe it should be set by the individual.
That move has a name: ethical subjectivism. The question is whether it’s any better than the view it’s trying to escape.
From the Culture to the Individual
The only ethical system I’ve looked at so far is cultural relativism (here and here): the view that to call something good is to say it’s culturally accepted. Its fatal weakness is that it leaves no room for anyone to stand morally apart from the crowd. The reformer, the abolitionist, the lone dissenter in a wicked society—relativism has to score all of them as wrong, because they’re defying the consensus.
Subjectivism fixes that by relocating the standard. Instead of “good means what my society approves of,” it says “good means what I approve of.” The individual becomes the measure. And suddenly the kid trying to stop the abuse isn’t a deviant. By her own lights, she’s right—which feels like a much-needed correction.
What Subjectivism Says
Ethical subjectivism is the view that what’s good or bad is relative to each subject and determined by that same subject. The key word is relative to a person. The subjectivist doesn’t say “murder is evil.” He says “murder is evil for Steve, not for Jerry.” Whether an act is wrong depends entirely on the individual doing the evaluating.
There are three ways to cash this out, depending on what you think a moral claim really reports:
- Taste: “Lying is wrong” just means “I don’t like lying.”
- Choice: “Lying is wrong” means “I choose to call lying wrong.”
- Beliefs: “Lying is wrong” means “I believe lying is wrong.”
On all three, there’s no further fact to check your judgment against. The judgment is the fact. So let’s look at why someone would find this attractive—and then at what it costs.
The Case for It
It makes room for moral freedom. At some point you’ve wanted to hurt someone—say a person who was so obnoxious you genuinely wished you could harm them, and you could’ve gotten away with it. What’s the morally mature thing to do? And here’s the argument: can you do the mature thing if you weren’t free to do otherwise? Maturity seems to require choosing your own path, and subjectivism is the view that lets you choose your own morality. No freedom, no maturity.
The trouble is that this confuses free choice of action with free choice of ethics. A mature person chooses the right thing. But if morality is purely subjective, there’s no right moral system to choose in the first place—so there’s no mature choice to make. You might pick the right option within your system: your code might say “don’t harm people no matter how obnoxious,” and you live up to it. Fine. But under subjectivism, the code that says “harm anyone you like” isn’t one inch less mature than the code that forbids it. Maturity within a system can’t get off the ground until you’ve already smuggled in a standard for ranking the systems—and that’s the very thing subjectivism denies you.
We already use “it’s good” and “I like it” interchangeably. “Ice cream is good” really just means “I like ice cream,” so why not treat all value talk that way? Because “good” doesn’t reduce so cleanly. “Broccoli is good” doesn’t mean “I like broccoli”—plenty of people who say it can’t stand the stuff. The word is doing different work there. Likewise, “giving to the poor is good” plainly doesn’t mean “I enjoy giving to the poor.” “Good” has a family of related meanings, and the moral one isn’t a synonym for “tasty.”
What we like tracks what’s good anyway. Our preferences and our moral judgments tend to line up, so we might as well say they’re the same thing. Except the link breaks exactly when it matters most: when we’re morally immature, which is often. Some people like hurting others. If liking something made it good, their cruelty would be good for them—and we’d have no way to say otherwise.
It promotes tolerance. This was the nice thing about cultural relativism: you never had to tell anyone they were wrong, and you got to keep your own morality. Subjectivism offers the same deal at the individual level. But notice what’s hiding in here. Why shouldn’t I tell other people they’re wrong? Because doing so is itself wrong? In whose moral system? On subjectivism, “tolerance is good” just means “I like tolerance”—and the second someone says “well, I don’t like tolerance,” the whole appeal collapses. A theory can’t demand tolerance when, by its own rules, tolerance is binding only on the people who already happen to prefer it.
The Trouble
The deeper problems start once you ask what the view actually commits you to.
We like things that clearly aren’t good. Smoking, for one. The subjectivist can answer this—he’ll say we’re confusing immediate satisfaction with long-term consequences, and that “good” tracks the fuller picture, not the momentary craving. That’s a fair reply. But look at what it concedes: “good” no longer means “like.” It now means something more complicated, something that can override what you like right now. The neat equation is already gone.
Moral judgments don’t feel like reports of preference. When I say “murder is wrong,” it doesn’t sound like I’m telling you about my tastes the way I would with pistachio ice cream. It sounds like I’m making a claim about the murder. That gives us at least a prima facie reason to doubt subjectivism.
Here the subjectivist has his best comeback, and it’s worth taking seriously. He’ll say we do objectify subjective reactions all the time—just look at humor. We have a private experience, “this strikes me as funny,” and then we dress it up as a claim about the world: “this is funny.” But the moment we meet someone who isn’t laughing, we quietly back off and admit there’s no fact of the matter about funniness. Maybe morality works the same way: a subjective reaction wearing the costume of an objective claim.
It’s a clever move. But the analogy is also where it strains. When people disagree about a joke, we really do shrug and let it go. When people disagree about whether genocide is wrong, we don’t shrug. We don’t say “well, to each his own.” We dig in. The way we actually treat moral disagreement looks nothing like the way we treat comedy—and that difference is itself evidence that we take morality to be tracking something real.
It fails the Hitler Test. This is the quickest way to feel the problem. If your liking something is what makes it good, then a man who likes genocide has made genocide good—for him. Any theory that hands that verdict to history’s worst people has gone wrong somewhere. (I’ve written more about why this test is so useful here.)
It doesn’t care where your likes come from. Subjectivism makes your preferences the source of goodness no matter how those preferences got there—stupidity, ignorance, sheer accident. And our preferences are often exactly that arbitrary. When I was in college, a friend’s girlfriend dumped him and started dating a guy named Chad. We started calling every dork we met a “Chad.” To this day, if I meet a guy named Chad, I have to consciously stop myself from holding it against him. There’s no reason behind it—just a dumb association burned in years ago. Now: if my likes and dislikes can be that baseless about people’s names, why on earth would I trust them to be the foundation of right and wrong?
It makes raising a good kid impossible. Suppose your child likes to torture the cat. On subjectivism there’s no right or wrong moral system, so if the kid’s operating system is “good means whatever I feel like doing right now,” then torturing the cat is, for him, good. You can’t correct him, because correction assumes there’s a better standard he’s failing to meet—and you’ve denied there is one. A theory that can’t underwrite moral education has a serious problem, because moral education is one of the things a theory of morality most needs to explain.
A Subtler Version
A careful subjectivist might try to dodge all this by saying it’s not that anything goes. Rather, there’s an objective truth in play: the truth that your own sincere ethical beliefs set the standard for you. That sounds more sophisticated, and it is. But it only pushes the question back a step. What makes it good that your beliefs get to set the standard? That can’t itself be just another one of your beliefs, on pain of going in a circle. Something outside your preferences has to do the grounding—God, a moral law, something. And the instant you admit that, you’ve walked back out of subjectivism and into the objective morality you were trying to avoid.
Where This Leaves Us
Subjectivism is a completely understandable reaction. Cultural relativism couldn’t make sense of the brave individual who stands against a corrupt society, and subjectivism rushes in to rescue that person. The intuition driving it—that you can be morally right even when everyone around you disagrees—is a good and true intuition.
But the rescue overcorrects. By making each individual the measure of good and evil, subjectivism can’t actually say the reformer is right and the abusers are wrong. It just moves the original problem from the crowd to the person. It can’t ground the tolerance it advertises, it can’t tell an informed conviction from an arbitrary grudge, and it can’t make sense of teaching a child to be good.
Here’s the irony worth sitting with. The thing subjectivism was built to protect—the individual who is right against the whole world—only makes sense if there’s a standard the world can be measured against. And that standard can’t come from the individual either. The very intuition that makes subjectivism attractive turns out to be an argument for objective morality, not against it.