meritocrat

I've never really studied philosophy so I need something to be clarified.

Does subjective morality mean that a person can form literally any moral code? If so, would it be 'wrong' for a person to feel they have a right to kill others (or otherwise cause harm to other people)?

Personally I feel that morality is subjective in that it does differ from person to person, nonetheless I just need some clarification.

Tom Sawyer

Objective morality means that there are things out there that are universally right or wrong, regardless of what individuals think of them. For instance, lying is always wrong, regardless of the justifications given for it. If someone feels that lying is OK in some circumstances, they are simply mistaken and would be acting immorally when they lie, whether they may realize this or not.

Subjective morality means that there is no absolute system of right or wrong out there. What individuals or societies think is a moral act is a moral act. When two people disagree on a moral question, such as whether lying is permissable under some circumstances, it's not the case that one is mistaken, it's just that they have different standards by which they are judging what is moral behaviour.

According to a view of subjective morality, a person could feel that he was morally justified to kill others. For instance, people who've shot abortion doctors have said they did this because it is a lesser evil to kill the doctor than let him kill all those unborn children, so the murder was not an immoral act. Those people, however, have to live within a society where that is not considered to be a justification for murder and are punished for the crime that the majority of the society considers immoral.

So, although a person could have whatever standard of morality they feel like having, if it is out of kilter with the rest of the society that they live in, they're going to be punished for it, regardless of whether they think they're doing anything wrong or not.

Psycho Economist

Totally depends on who you're talking to.

Moral realists strawman the subjectivist position, saying we insist that peoples' valuations make actions right or wrong... Maybe they do so to scare people who conform to moral realism out of complacence. Maybe they can't swallow the idea that an opinion they agree with is still just an opinion. Maybe they can't comprehend a universe where moral values aren't ultimately, somewhere, somehow, matters of fact.

Since most people are realists, they get to put words in our mouths in the philosophy textbooks and not vice versa. Instead of extrapolating from moral relativism, most subjectivists I know (and most you'll find on this board) start from moral skepticism to arrive at the subjectivist position.

Also, TS, moral realism doesn't correspond to moral absolutism 100%. Absolutism is the beilef that certain classes of actions are always and inherantly right or wrong. Realism is a weaker position that only insists there's some fact of the matter in moral judgments: that what we think is right and wrong doesn't matter. While the absolutist would always favor deceit over murder, the realist could conceivably find a situation where murder is less wrong than deceit.

Psycho Economist

Okay, I've decided to do a play-by-play after all...
That is a correct implication of the subjectivist position, yes... but that's not the beginning or the end of it.
Nope. When individuals' values decide morality, it's emotivism (a form of relativism) and when cultural norms decide morality, it's cultural relativism.
Right... but those moral judgments don't, in fact, make anything right or wrong.
Was it right? In fact? No. Was it wrong? No. But everybody's entitled to an opinion about whether they think it was right or wrong.
There's a big gap between "justified" and "moral". Abortion-provider snipers are among the most fixed absolutists... to them killing a "murder" is less wrong than "killing a baby". To them, the "rightness" or "wrongness" of killing the doctor in isolation aside, it's still preferable... and so justified.
No kidding.

The difference is that a subjectivist's interest in criminal legislation is balancing freedom of conscience with not letting "bad" things happen, whatever we can agree "bad" to mean. The realist's interest is crafting legislation that is asymptotically closer to whatever he perceives to be moral perfection.

Alonzo Fyfe

Maybe, maybe not.

There are about 136,979 different definitions of "subjective morality" out there, and 139,272 definitions of "objective morality", and the only thing they have in common is that "subjective morality" says that moral claims are about the subject making the evaluation and "objective morality" says that moral claims are about the object being evaluated.

And there are mixed systems who say that moral claims are "a little of both."

Among the various types of subjective morality:

Agent-belief-subjectivism
Agent-desire-subjectivism
Assessor-belief-subjectivism
Assessor-desire-subjectivism
Cultural-belief-subjectivism
Cultural-desire-subjectivism
Belief-intersubjectivism
Desire-intersubjectivism
Emotivism
Noncognitivism
Prescriptivism
Ontological (second-order) subjectivism
Error theory
Cultural moral relativism
Individual moral relativism
Ethical descriptivism
Non-absolutism
Situational ethics

[Note: Some of these systems can also be objective -- depending on how certain specifics are worked out.]

I believe that some forms of subjectivism are correct. But, those forms I accept are not the forms that allow people to just pick any old set of propositions they want and call them "moral."

The answer, then, is, "it depends."