Thursday, April 27, 2017

Do you believe morals are objective or subjective?

I’ve recently been thinking about the distinction between values being objective or subjective, while playing Football Tactics, a video game about soccer. The way the standings work in this soccer game (I'm assuming it's based on how they work in real leagues, but I'm not familiar enough with soccer to know for sure) is a points system, where a team gets 3 points for winning a match and 1 point for a draw (there’s no overtime). If two teams have the same number of points, then their ranking is decided by “Goal Difference” (the number of goals they’ve scored, subtracted by the number of goals their opponents have scored). 

Now, is this ranking system objective or subjective? One could argue that it’s subjective because the decision to use that system was just some people’s opinion; it’s not like that’s the way it has to be. Someone else could argue that it’s objective, because deciding what rank a team should have at any given time is based on hard numbers and concrete data, not anyone’s feelings or opinion about which team is better (the way college football rankings used to work before the BCS was established). What this has made me realize is that it would probably be helpful in discussions of whether a value system is objective or subjective, if we draw a line between “origin” (how a certain value system came to be established), and “implementation” (how it is judged whether something is good or bad in a value system, after it has been established). 

Even with that distinction, the more I work through this thought process, the more confident I become that the idea of objective values simply doesn’t make sense, either in origin or implementation. I can’t think of any way that the origin of a moral system wouldn’t be subjective, since it’s always just based on somebody’s opinion (or their nature, or whatever). It is never and could never be “just the way it is.” As for implementation, I think that has to be subjective too, because there’s just no way to boil it down to hard numbers and concrete data like a soccer ranking. Even if you use as concise a moral framework as “avoid unnecessary harm,” there’s still plenty of subjectivity in judging what is harmful, what is necessary, and even what is avoidable. Everything about morality is subjective, there's no way for it not to be; I can’t see any way around that.

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