Fun fact: the switch to driving on the right in Sweden 1967 was preceded by a non-binding referendum in 1955 where more than 80% voted against. Parliament still pushed it through. Not sure what that says about contractarianism...
You say, "This idea does not reflect how morality works in real life, and for a contractarian, it is logically inconsistent."
I don’t think it’s so clear that subjectivism isn’t how morality works out in real life, and I think this claim is probably based on not appreciating how well subjectivism can accommodate how people in fact behave.
You say, "If moral views were just things that can differ in each of our heads, how would they work? Why would Alice care when Bob tells her she is wrong, according to his own principles of morality?"
People can have subjective preferences about how other people act. Subjectivism simply holds that moral claims are true or false relative to the standards of individuals. It is entirely consistent with this, and not unexpected, that people care about those standard and want to see them enforced. When those standards come into conflict with someone with contrary standards, of course people are going to care. Why wouldn’t Alice care if Bob tells her she’s wrong? This indicates Bob is disposed to act in ways inconsistent with Alice’s subjective values!
You say: “Why should she grant this claim more significance than if Bob were pointing out that he prefers chocolate ice cream, contrary to her choice of vanilla flavour?”
There is a difference between whether a standard is made true by subjective preferences or stance-independent truths on the one hand (this is a matter of what makes claims true), and, on the other, the scope of a normative concern. Ice cream preferences are typically narrow in scope, applying only to oneself. But moral standards can and typically do concern how other people conduct themselves. So a preference for vanilla ice cream might be cashed out as “I would like to eat vanilla, but I don’t really care what others eat,” whereas a moral preference may be “I would like nobody to torture anyone, so I do carewhat others do.” Both standards can be subjective, and yet the latter concerns other people’s conduct. If the vanilla ice cream lover encounters a person who wants to eat chocolate ice cream, they won’t care because their taste preferences only concern their own conduct. In contrast, if an anti-torture person encounters a pro-torture person, they will care because that person may torture others or create situations in which torture is more likely to occur.
Binmore’s objection also isn’t very good:
“[M]oral subjectivism is absurd because it overlooks the fact that moral rules evolved to help human beings coordinate their behavior. But successful coordination depends on everybody operating the same moral rules. If everybody in a society made up their own standards, there wouldn’t be any point in having moral rules at all.”
Subjectivism typically begins with the claim that when people make moral claims they are reporting their subjective values. This is either true or false. Subjectivism couldn’t reasonably be said to “overlook” how or why moral rules evolved; a subjectivist could agree that this is true and then just affirm subjectivism anyway. Nothing about the position entails overlooking this claim. I don’t even know how or why someone would argue such a thing, and I question whether it even makes sense to accuse a position of overlooking things. Positions don’t overlook things; the people defending them do, and I don’t know of any good reason to think subjectivists overlook this fact (if it is a fact). Second, the point about there not being any point of people having standards is misguided. This sounds like an objection to subjectivism based on its consequences. Views aren’t wrong because you don’t like the consequences. If the reasoning is a bit better than this, and one reasons from the fact that we do have morality, so it must have a point, but if we were subjectivists it wouldn’t, so we’re probably not subjectivists, that’s fine, but then it’s an open question whether or not there would be no point in having morality. I don’t agree with Binmore that there wouldn’t be a point in having moral rules. Moral rules could be seen as compromises people come to whether or not moral truth is ultimately subjective. Such compromises are consistent with everyone being a subjectivist, since there are going to be optimum coordinative solutions for people even if they are subjectivists.
Think of it this way. Suppose everyone was a committed subjectivist, and they all had somewhat different moral values. Would they just…not have moral rules? I don’t see why we should imagine this would occur. It would likely be in their respective self-interests to reach compromises and negotiate on rules that optimize conflict reduction and other considerations that allow each person to best achieve their values given value conflicts with others. Or they’d go to war, as people often do, and hope to win. Given how people actually act, “everyone is a subjectivist” thus doesn’t strike me as that terrible of a position.
Hi Lance, here are answers, interspersed with your points.
"Subjectivism typically begins with the claim that when people make moral claims they are reporting their subjective values."
> This starting point is fine. However, subjectivism tells us that we have subjective values, but not whether there are some limitations on the type of values we have and where these limitations would come from. Is any distribution of values possible in a population? The rebuttal I am putting forward is that subjectivism typically comes without any constraint on what these values might be. This is where the problem lies for a contractarian because only shared standards can effectively regulate social interactions. If everybody can have any value, these values cannot work as a way to regulate interaction by making people agree on how to cooperate and how to split the gains from cooperation.
"Subjectivism couldn’t reasonably be said to ‘overlook’ how or why moral rules evolved; a subjectivist could agree that this is true and then just affirm subjectivism anyway."
> Fair. My target is not a sophisticated subjectivism that incorporates evolutionary and cultural constraints. I am criticising a “free-floating” subjectivism where each person’s standards are independent and there is no requirement of convergence on common rules. That version struggles to explain morality as a system of shared constraints on behaviour.
“then it’s an open question whether or not there not being any point of people having standards is misguided.”
> The issue is not that there is “no point” in people having standards. It is that, as an account of morality, a picture with largely divergent individual standards and little overlap does not explain the practice we see: a system of norms that coordinates expectations because people’s standards do in fact coincide to a large extent.
“Moral rules could be seen as compromises people come to whether or not moral truth is ultimately subjective. Such compromises are consistent with everyone being a subjectivist, since there are going to be optimum coordinative solutions for people even if they are subjectivists."
> This is close to Binmore’s and my view: moral rules are compromises people reach that support mutually beneficial coordination. You emphasise that such compromises are possible even if individuals start with different subjective values. I agree; but that is exactly my point. Once we appeal to coordination and compromise to explain which “moral” standards actually matter, the explanatory work is being done by the social-contract/equilibrium structure, not by subjectivism as a semantic thesis. We still need to explain where the particular compromise rules come from and why they are treated as binding.
“Think of it this way. Suppose everyone was a committed subjectivist, and they all had somewhat different moral values. Would they just…not have moral rules? I don’t see why we should imagine this would occur. It would likely be in their respective self-interests to reach compromises and negotiate on rules that optimize conflict reduction and other considerations that allow each person to best achieve their values given value conflicts with others. Or they’d go to war, as people often do, and hope to win. Given how people actually act, ‘everyone is a subjectivist’ thus doesn’t strike me as that terrible of a position.”
> Morality is a label we put on certain practices and views. Take a simple analogy: we sit down to play a new board game, but each of us has a different rule set in mind. We both have subjective preferences over possible rules, and relative to each prospective rule set some moves are “right” or “wrong”. Can we say the game has rules at this stage? Only in the thin sense that there are competing candidate rules. The game can actually be played only once there is a commonly agreed rule set. At that point the rules are still grounded in our subjective agreement, but they are now shared and can function as public standards. My point is that morality, as we actually use it, looks like the “agreed rules” stage, not the “everyone has their own rule book” stage.
One way to see the difference is to look at what “you are wrong” means under the view I labelled "subjectivist" which we could call "strict subjectivism" here, and contractarianism.
On a strict subjectivist reading, “you are wrong” amounts to “what you did conflicts with my values”. It is basically an expression of disapproval from my own standpoint.
On a contractarian view, “you are wrong” is a different kind of move: it appeals to a shared standard. It means something like “you are violating the commonly accepted rules of behaviour that we rely on to coordinate, and that you are (or should be) aware of”.
In other words, subjectivism treats moral criticism as fundamentally first-personal (“here is where I stand”), whereas contractarianism treats it as second-personal and intersubjective (“here is the rule we share or are proposing to share”).
Conclusion: I am not sure we are in disagreement fundamentally. Like you I believe morality is all in our head. If one wants to label that subjectivism, fine. What Binmore and I reject is stopping there to describe morality, allowing statements such as “everyone has their own morality”. Such a statement is as strange as saying “everyone has their own rules of Scrabble”, because Scrabble has rules only to the extent that people agree to them. An understanding of how we are able to play Scrabble therefore requires an understanding of how individuals end up sharing common views about the way to play Scrabble. I suspect you might agree with this latter point but would then say that it is still a subjectivist perspective. If so, that is fine with me.
> Subjectivism typically begins with the claim that when people make moral claims they are reporting their subjective values.
That's like saying that when people make empirical claims they are reporting their subjective observations. There is a sense in which that's true, but it doesn't stop us from recognizing the existence of objective reality.
I'm glad to see someone calling attention to the rhetorical critiques directed at relativist views. A small note on the surveys at the beginning of the article:
These are fascinating polls and it’s great to see people conducting studies like this, but caution is in order. My own and other people’s research has consistently shown that the participants in studies that are more comprehensive than these polls struggle to interpret questions about metaethics (including questions about moral relativism) as intended. They instead interpret them in a variety of unintended ways. As a result, there are strong grounds for skepticism that responses to the surveys you’ve provided do not provide strong evidence about the proportion of respondents who endorse moral relativism. In short: attempts to measure metaethical views are largely invalid, so we're not in a good position to know what proportion of the general public endorses moral relativism.
"A frequent interpretation of moral relativism is subjectivism, which can be summarised by the idea that everyone has his or her own truths. This idea does not reflect how morality works in real life, and for a contractarian, it is logically inconsistent."
Your attitude towards subjectivism is bewildering to me. Do you mean that people can't form their own interpretation of ethical principles? One person might hold the principle "Murder is wrong because it leads to punishment." Another might hold the principle, "Murder is wrong because it disrupts the social order." Each one has their own version of ethics, or their own ethical truth, as you say, and where is the harm in that? It's obviously wrong to say that everyone must have the same beliefs about ethics for society to function. These two people have very different views of murder, yet neither of them is going to commit murder. It seems to me that we should tolerate differences of opinion about ethical matters so long as they don't lead to anarchy.
What about sexual ethics? A lot of people find monogamous marriage to be morally right, but others enjoy a variety of partners. Are you really saying that everyone has to have the same view of these things? Your version of morality seems like a terribly repressive demand for uniformity.
Thanks Ian, this is helpful because it surfaces where we are talking past each other.
I am not denying that people form their own interpretations of moral principles, or that there can be pluralism in how people justify the same rule. In your murder example, both people endorse the same prohibition (“do not murder”) while offering different explanations (“punishment” vs “social order”). That kind of variation is entirely compatible with a contractarian view. In fact, it is almost trivial that people with different psychologies or backgrounds give different stories about why they think a shared rule is right.
The version of subjectivism I am pushing back against is stronger. It is the “everyone has their own truths” view where there is no requirement of convergence on common standards at the level that actually regulates interaction. For a contractarian, morality is first and foremost a system of shared rules that coordinate behaviour and divide the gains from cooperation. If everyone can have any standard they like, with no constraints that push towards agreement on some core rules (around violence, property, promise-keeping, etc.), then those “standards” cannot play the role that morality in fact plays in real societies.
One way to see the difference is to look at what “you are wrong” means under the view I called “subjectivist” (let’s say “strict subjectivism” here) and under contractarianism. On a strict subjectivist reading, “you are wrong” amounts to “what you did conflicts with my values”. It is basically an expression of disapproval from my own standpoint. On a contractarian view, “you are wrong” is a different kind of move: it appeals to a shared standard. It means something like “you are violating the commonly accepted rules of behaviour that we rely on to coordinate, and that you are (or should be) aware of”. In other words, strict subjectivism treats moral criticism as fundamentally first-personal (“here is where I stand”), whereas contractarianism treats it as second-personal and intersubjective (“here is the rule we share or are proposing to share”).
On sexual ethics, I am also not saying everyone must have exactly the same views. Liberal societies tolerate a fair degree of pluralism in domains where coordination problems are weaker: people can hold different ideals about monogamy, polyamory, celibacy, and so on, as long as there is a minimal legal/ethical framework that protects consent, children’s welfare, and so forth. That is perfectly consistent with a contractarian picture: some domains demand tight convergence on common rules; others permit multiple equilibria and subcultures.
So my target is not “ordinary disagreement about reasons” or “tolerating different lifestyles”. It is the idea that morality as an institution can be understood simply as each person’s private “ethical truth”, without explaining how and why we end up with the shared rule systems that actually structure social life. On that point I suspect we may be closer than the word “subjectivism” suggests.
I think that what you call "relativism" and I call "subjectivism" have a lot in common. Although I don't discuss this in the article that I linked to, I think people acting solely on their own desires and with their own ethical truths ought to converge on shared rules due to the contractarian logic that you spell out, although contractarianism is a highly idealized account of how this happens. After all, people don't desire to be constantly in conflict with others, so they have an incentive to thrash out common laws and norms that enable them to live at peace with each other.
I also think that a society of subjectivists can critique the contract and the ethical commitments behind it based on their preferences and outcomes, as you say. I would also say that you can critique the contract for being based on false beliefs. Laws dividing society into castes typically rest on the notion that people of different castes are fundamentally biologically different, and this assumption can be challenged for being factually inaccurate.
I would also push back on the notion that violating a community's norms is necessarily wrong. After all, if you live in an unduly repressive society, then anger is appropriate. As I explain in my article, I would say that a better definition of a wrong action is an action that a reasonable person wouldn't want to do after deliberation. So you can violate the community's norms if you want to, but you had better think seriously about whether your commitment is based on justified beliefs and about how the community might try to punish you for violating its norms.
The fact someone can regard society as the actual enemy but still have moral standards indicates something other than social and moral standards being synonymous. The fact self-sacrificial altruism and doing the right thing even if this leads to personal disadvantage is considered a feature of morality indicates something other than self-interested game theoretic pay-offs as underlying moral intuitions(though doesn't argue against a social-evolutionary basis for morality in itself, bacteria seem to indicate such altruism is selected for even when evolution itself is the primary form of 'cognition' being undergone).
There was no movement against slavery in classical times. There was however notably the notion of a golden age in which no one was a slave.
I think this is exactly where the proximate/ultimate distinction matters. At the proximate level, I agree with you: people do not experience morality as self-interest calculations. They can see “society” as the enemy and still have strong moral standards, and self-sacrifice is often taken as the purest case of being moral. Our phenomenology of morality is about guilt, indignation, duty, loyalty, not about maximising payoffs. My claim is about the ultimate level: why do creatures with this kind of phenomenology exist at all? A contractarian/evolutionary story says that, over time, groups whose members converged on workable norms and enforcement (solving coordination and conflict problems) tended to do better than groups that did not. The selection pressure is on equilibrium properties and payoffs; the psychological vehicle that carries that equilibrium can quite naturally be a sense of “duty” or “doing the right thing even when it hurts”, not an explicit self-interest maximiser in anyone’s head.
The same applies to altruism. Proximately, people feel outrage, solidarity, compassion and act at a cost; they do not tell themselves “this raises my expected discounted utility”. Ultimately, though, it is unsurprising if selection has favoured types who are prepared to incur costs for principles in the kinds of repeated, reputation-laden interactions humans face. That does not mean “everyone is secretly selfish in their head”. It means that dispositions which look self-sacrificial from the inside can still be the outcome of selection on long-run payoffs at the level of individuals and groups. The interest discussion belongs at that explanatory level, not at the level of how moral motives feel from the first-person point of view.
I can see how many moral preferences and judgments (based on notions of fairness, justice, etc.) could be equilibria for creating a society that reduces conflict and favors cooperation. But what are your thoughts on moral duties and behavior towards non-human animals and other entities that are not in a position to bargain or to even interact with the humans that negotiate the social contract? Is our intuition that it is morally wrong to torture a bird for no good reason just an overgeneralization of a do no harm heuristic that was selected for with other humans in mind? So there is nothing wrong with a society in which all members agree that torturing birds is fine because (a) they all agree on it and (b) it does not affect cooperation/conflict in the society? Or is there some other reason why we should see this society as having sub-optimal moral rules?
Hey Bastian, I agree with your comment in principle, however, if you look at the state of modern agriculture and farming, it seems that animal harm/mistreatment is widely accepted.
There might come a time when the animal rights movement is able to garner more traction and make politicians sign regulations regarding animal conditions (which would be great) but until then, most us are probably living in a society that sees nothing wrong with torturing(overfeeding, crowding, forced breeding then separating the newborn calf from its mother...) animals for food.
Unfortunately, I think this example proves Lionel's point that we, as a society, collectively decide our morality, rules of cooperation, and actual law.
My problem as a historian is that multiple societies have reached states of equilibria that have lasted thousands of years without ever even once considering (by way of just one example) slavery morally wrong. The current “consensus” (scare quotes are there because plenty of places on the planet pay lip service the notion that slavery is immoral, but continue to practice it enthusiastically) that slavery is “bad” is a very recent phenomenon. Either way, slave societies have proved to be excellent at attaining states of social equilibrium throughout history. [The genocide example is even more telling: how many genocides have occurred since that UN definition was ratified?]
Thanks for the thought provoking piece. In this comment I want to raise two related issues having to do with the status of moral claims made by reformers which I do not think was adequately dealt with.
On social contractarianism, moral claims are true or false relative to a society’s moral code. Therefore, prior to society’s adoption of a moral it was false-relative to that society-that the moral was true. Therefore, all the moral claims of moral reformers are initially false. For instance, when slavery was common practice in the United States and some advocated for its abolition, there claim that slavery is wrong was false.
This may not be a knock down argument against social contractarianism but it definitely is inconsistent with pretheoretical moral judgements that, for instance, when abolitionists asserted that slavery was wrong, they were not saying something false. Any meta-ethical theory worth its salt will either find a way to block this revision of pretheoretical moral judgements or show why those pretheoretical judgements were mistaken and the cost of revision worthwhile. I wonder what you think of this proposal.
You write that “Nonetheless, in practice, moral language is often part of the bargaining and mobilization that makes a new agreement possible.” While your right that moral language is still used in the context of reform, this does not provide a solution to the problem. God may be shown not to exist by some body of evidence. When this evidence is presented to the believer he may remark that people will continue to believe in God and use religious language despite this. He may be correct but this is not relevant/does not address the evidence which his interlocutor has put forward against his claim. However, that moral language is used during political mobilization does shed light on a related issue. Not only is the moral language of reformers prior to the reforms they advocate for false but it is also true that insofar as anyone is convinced or persuaded by the reformer’s moral arguments, they are convinced or persuaded by false moral claims. For instance, insofar as anyone is convinced prior to the abolition of slavery that it is wrong because it is inconsistent with human autonomy and dignity prior are persuaded on the basis of a claim that is (or was) in fact false. While again I don’t think this is a knock down argument against contractarianism it is another way in which it would require a major revision to pretheoretical moral judgements.
If it is up to us, who among us decides? And why? Is it a gender, intelligence, ethnic, or experience based decision? Relational contracts are all too often a cost/benefit analysis. Self-interest underlies it all in which might becomes right and people become oppressed. The outcomes are on display today.
I found it very convincing and understand how morality constitutes the rules that the collective/society agrees upon to foster a social equilibrium like you explained.
One thing that came to mind as I was reading this, was that this social equilibrium of morality can change over time. Some moral principles may be considered traditional and respected for having stood the test of time but might be maladapted to the new conditions of our present day. Whether it be from technology, geopolitical events, political movements, internet trends... our culture and societies are constantly changing (faster and faster with the internet). I see political participation and being involved with your community as incredibly important; Being active allows you to voice your opinion and vote on what you believe the social equilibrium should be. Political participation and being a part of a community used to be 'automatic' in prior societies but nowadays it is much easier to limit your participation in society.
Additionally, this also made me think that this only applies to democracies or societies where people actually take into consideration others' point of view and want to cooperate. If we define morality as the set of rules (whether explicitly enforced through law or implicitly enforced through cultural norms) that leads to a social equilibrium, could we not see situations where a dominant party dictates and enforces a social equilibrium onto the rest of the group? I can think of multiple examples: any international law infringement, religious sects (example: FLDS cult leader Warren Jeffs), monopolies in business making things worse for their consumers... As an outsider, it is evident that these situations would be seen as immoral or wrong but I wonder if the people within (especially if they were born into this environment and never had exposure to anything else) could also view their social equilibrium as wrong? Would a situation such as those -- which will inevitably lead to more conflict be considered as an unstable social equilibrium?
Hi Eugine, I don’t think this is a fair characterisation. The post explicitly situates itself in the usual metaethical terms: relativism versus realism. The conclusion is clearly against realism in that sense: it does not make sense to suppose the existence of unconditional, stance-independent oughts.
I can nonetheless take your comment as suggesting that my conclusion does not sound too far from how we experience morality. That is intentional. The aim is to explain morality as it actually works, so the view should preserve much of our everyday phenomenology of moral disagreement and criticism.
Rather than a motte-and-bailey, I would see the move as closer to going from geocentrism to heliocentrism: the underlying picture of what is really going on changes, and some theoretical commitments have to be abandoned, but our ordinary experience of the world is largely preserved and re-explained.
> Hi Eugine, I don’t think this is a fair characterisation. The post explicitly situates itself in the usual metaethical terms: relativism versus realism.
Yes, and than you insist that "relativism" doesn't mean any of the thinks the term is usually used to mean.
> The conclusion is clearly against realism in that sense:
Except that conclusion does not actually follow from your argument.
My suspicion of what's going on is that there some moral rules that you rejected and made that rejection part of your identity long before you ever learned about game theory or any of the other intricacies you mentioned in the article. Now it's likely the rules in question are indeed correct in the sense of being favorable to societies that adopt them, but since you don't want to admit that, you have to play these kind of games.
I am not sure I understand your psychological conjecture. But whatever the history of how I came to my present views, I think they should simply be criticised for what they are and how I put them forward.
I note that this post has not been convincing enough for you, and that is, in any case, useful information.
> But whatever the history of how I came to my present views, I think they should simply be criticised for what they are and how I put them forward.
That's what I was doing in my first comment, and the first half of my second.
Frankly, from an outside point of view the contradiction in your views is so glaring, that the only way they make sense is by reference to your intellectual history which explains your blind spots.
Fun fact: the switch to driving on the right in Sweden 1967 was preceded by a non-binding referendum in 1955 where more than 80% voted against. Parliament still pushed it through. Not sure what that says about contractarianism...
You say, "This idea does not reflect how morality works in real life, and for a contractarian, it is logically inconsistent."
I don’t think it’s so clear that subjectivism isn’t how morality works out in real life, and I think this claim is probably based on not appreciating how well subjectivism can accommodate how people in fact behave.
You say, "If moral views were just things that can differ in each of our heads, how would they work? Why would Alice care when Bob tells her she is wrong, according to his own principles of morality?"
People can have subjective preferences about how other people act. Subjectivism simply holds that moral claims are true or false relative to the standards of individuals. It is entirely consistent with this, and not unexpected, that people care about those standard and want to see them enforced. When those standards come into conflict with someone with contrary standards, of course people are going to care. Why wouldn’t Alice care if Bob tells her she’s wrong? This indicates Bob is disposed to act in ways inconsistent with Alice’s subjective values!
You say: “Why should she grant this claim more significance than if Bob were pointing out that he prefers chocolate ice cream, contrary to her choice of vanilla flavour?”
There is a difference between whether a standard is made true by subjective preferences or stance-independent truths on the one hand (this is a matter of what makes claims true), and, on the other, the scope of a normative concern. Ice cream preferences are typically narrow in scope, applying only to oneself. But moral standards can and typically do concern how other people conduct themselves. So a preference for vanilla ice cream might be cashed out as “I would like to eat vanilla, but I don’t really care what others eat,” whereas a moral preference may be “I would like nobody to torture anyone, so I do carewhat others do.” Both standards can be subjective, and yet the latter concerns other people’s conduct. If the vanilla ice cream lover encounters a person who wants to eat chocolate ice cream, they won’t care because their taste preferences only concern their own conduct. In contrast, if an anti-torture person encounters a pro-torture person, they will care because that person may torture others or create situations in which torture is more likely to occur.
Binmore’s objection also isn’t very good:
“[M]oral subjectivism is absurd because it overlooks the fact that moral rules evolved to help human beings coordinate their behavior. But successful coordination depends on everybody operating the same moral rules. If everybody in a society made up their own standards, there wouldn’t be any point in having moral rules at all.”
Subjectivism typically begins with the claim that when people make moral claims they are reporting their subjective values. This is either true or false. Subjectivism couldn’t reasonably be said to “overlook” how or why moral rules evolved; a subjectivist could agree that this is true and then just affirm subjectivism anyway. Nothing about the position entails overlooking this claim. I don’t even know how or why someone would argue such a thing, and I question whether it even makes sense to accuse a position of overlooking things. Positions don’t overlook things; the people defending them do, and I don’t know of any good reason to think subjectivists overlook this fact (if it is a fact). Second, the point about there not being any point of people having standards is misguided. This sounds like an objection to subjectivism based on its consequences. Views aren’t wrong because you don’t like the consequences. If the reasoning is a bit better than this, and one reasons from the fact that we do have morality, so it must have a point, but if we were subjectivists it wouldn’t, so we’re probably not subjectivists, that’s fine, but then it’s an open question whether or not there would be no point in having morality. I don’t agree with Binmore that there wouldn’t be a point in having moral rules. Moral rules could be seen as compromises people come to whether or not moral truth is ultimately subjective. Such compromises are consistent with everyone being a subjectivist, since there are going to be optimum coordinative solutions for people even if they are subjectivists.
Think of it this way. Suppose everyone was a committed subjectivist, and they all had somewhat different moral values. Would they just…not have moral rules? I don’t see why we should imagine this would occur. It would likely be in their respective self-interests to reach compromises and negotiate on rules that optimize conflict reduction and other considerations that allow each person to best achieve their values given value conflicts with others. Or they’d go to war, as people often do, and hope to win. Given how people actually act, “everyone is a subjectivist” thus doesn’t strike me as that terrible of a position.
Hi Lance, here are answers, interspersed with your points.
"Subjectivism typically begins with the claim that when people make moral claims they are reporting their subjective values."
> This starting point is fine. However, subjectivism tells us that we have subjective values, but not whether there are some limitations on the type of values we have and where these limitations would come from. Is any distribution of values possible in a population? The rebuttal I am putting forward is that subjectivism typically comes without any constraint on what these values might be. This is where the problem lies for a contractarian because only shared standards can effectively regulate social interactions. If everybody can have any value, these values cannot work as a way to regulate interaction by making people agree on how to cooperate and how to split the gains from cooperation.
"Subjectivism couldn’t reasonably be said to ‘overlook’ how or why moral rules evolved; a subjectivist could agree that this is true and then just affirm subjectivism anyway."
> Fair. My target is not a sophisticated subjectivism that incorporates evolutionary and cultural constraints. I am criticising a “free-floating” subjectivism where each person’s standards are independent and there is no requirement of convergence on common rules. That version struggles to explain morality as a system of shared constraints on behaviour.
“then it’s an open question whether or not there not being any point of people having standards is misguided.”
> The issue is not that there is “no point” in people having standards. It is that, as an account of morality, a picture with largely divergent individual standards and little overlap does not explain the practice we see: a system of norms that coordinates expectations because people’s standards do in fact coincide to a large extent.
“Moral rules could be seen as compromises people come to whether or not moral truth is ultimately subjective. Such compromises are consistent with everyone being a subjectivist, since there are going to be optimum coordinative solutions for people even if they are subjectivists."
> This is close to Binmore’s and my view: moral rules are compromises people reach that support mutually beneficial coordination. You emphasise that such compromises are possible even if individuals start with different subjective values. I agree; but that is exactly my point. Once we appeal to coordination and compromise to explain which “moral” standards actually matter, the explanatory work is being done by the social-contract/equilibrium structure, not by subjectivism as a semantic thesis. We still need to explain where the particular compromise rules come from and why they are treated as binding.
“Think of it this way. Suppose everyone was a committed subjectivist, and they all had somewhat different moral values. Would they just…not have moral rules? I don’t see why we should imagine this would occur. It would likely be in their respective self-interests to reach compromises and negotiate on rules that optimize conflict reduction and other considerations that allow each person to best achieve their values given value conflicts with others. Or they’d go to war, as people often do, and hope to win. Given how people actually act, ‘everyone is a subjectivist’ thus doesn’t strike me as that terrible of a position.”
> Morality is a label we put on certain practices and views. Take a simple analogy: we sit down to play a new board game, but each of us has a different rule set in mind. We both have subjective preferences over possible rules, and relative to each prospective rule set some moves are “right” or “wrong”. Can we say the game has rules at this stage? Only in the thin sense that there are competing candidate rules. The game can actually be played only once there is a commonly agreed rule set. At that point the rules are still grounded in our subjective agreement, but they are now shared and can function as public standards. My point is that morality, as we actually use it, looks like the “agreed rules” stage, not the “everyone has their own rule book” stage.
One way to see the difference is to look at what “you are wrong” means under the view I labelled "subjectivist" which we could call "strict subjectivism" here, and contractarianism.
On a strict subjectivist reading, “you are wrong” amounts to “what you did conflicts with my values”. It is basically an expression of disapproval from my own standpoint.
On a contractarian view, “you are wrong” is a different kind of move: it appeals to a shared standard. It means something like “you are violating the commonly accepted rules of behaviour that we rely on to coordinate, and that you are (or should be) aware of”.
In other words, subjectivism treats moral criticism as fundamentally first-personal (“here is where I stand”), whereas contractarianism treats it as second-personal and intersubjective (“here is the rule we share or are proposing to share”).
Conclusion: I am not sure we are in disagreement fundamentally. Like you I believe morality is all in our head. If one wants to label that subjectivism, fine. What Binmore and I reject is stopping there to describe morality, allowing statements such as “everyone has their own morality”. Such a statement is as strange as saying “everyone has their own rules of Scrabble”, because Scrabble has rules only to the extent that people agree to them. An understanding of how we are able to play Scrabble therefore requires an understanding of how individuals end up sharing common views about the way to play Scrabble. I suspect you might agree with this latter point but would then say that it is still a subjectivist perspective. If so, that is fine with me.
> Subjectivism typically begins with the claim that when people make moral claims they are reporting their subjective values.
That's like saying that when people make empirical claims they are reporting their subjective observations. There is a sense in which that's true, but it doesn't stop us from recognizing the existence of objective reality.
It is like that, yes. Metaethical subjectivism doesn't deny objective reality.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and just tell you to read my comment again.
No.
I'm glad to see someone calling attention to the rhetorical critiques directed at relativist views. A small note on the surveys at the beginning of the article:
These are fascinating polls and it’s great to see people conducting studies like this, but caution is in order. My own and other people’s research has consistently shown that the participants in studies that are more comprehensive than these polls struggle to interpret questions about metaethics (including questions about moral relativism) as intended. They instead interpret them in a variety of unintended ways. As a result, there are strong grounds for skepticism that responses to the surveys you’ve provided do not provide strong evidence about the proportion of respondents who endorse moral relativism. In short: attempts to measure metaethical views are largely invalid, so we're not in a good position to know what proportion of the general public endorses moral relativism.
"A frequent interpretation of moral relativism is subjectivism, which can be summarised by the idea that everyone has his or her own truths. This idea does not reflect how morality works in real life, and for a contractarian, it is logically inconsistent."
Your attitude towards subjectivism is bewildering to me. Do you mean that people can't form their own interpretation of ethical principles? One person might hold the principle "Murder is wrong because it leads to punishment." Another might hold the principle, "Murder is wrong because it disrupts the social order." Each one has their own version of ethics, or their own ethical truth, as you say, and where is the harm in that? It's obviously wrong to say that everyone must have the same beliefs about ethics for society to function. These two people have very different views of murder, yet neither of them is going to commit murder. It seems to me that we should tolerate differences of opinion about ethical matters so long as they don't lead to anarchy.
What about sexual ethics? A lot of people find monogamous marriage to be morally right, but others enjoy a variety of partners. Are you really saying that everyone has to have the same view of these things? Your version of morality seems like a terribly repressive demand for uniformity.
For more on subjectivism, see my: https://open.substack.com/pub/eclecticinquiries/p/on-deliberative-subjectivism?r=4952v2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Thanks Ian, this is helpful because it surfaces where we are talking past each other.
I am not denying that people form their own interpretations of moral principles, or that there can be pluralism in how people justify the same rule. In your murder example, both people endorse the same prohibition (“do not murder”) while offering different explanations (“punishment” vs “social order”). That kind of variation is entirely compatible with a contractarian view. In fact, it is almost trivial that people with different psychologies or backgrounds give different stories about why they think a shared rule is right.
The version of subjectivism I am pushing back against is stronger. It is the “everyone has their own truths” view where there is no requirement of convergence on common standards at the level that actually regulates interaction. For a contractarian, morality is first and foremost a system of shared rules that coordinate behaviour and divide the gains from cooperation. If everyone can have any standard they like, with no constraints that push towards agreement on some core rules (around violence, property, promise-keeping, etc.), then those “standards” cannot play the role that morality in fact plays in real societies.
One way to see the difference is to look at what “you are wrong” means under the view I called “subjectivist” (let’s say “strict subjectivism” here) and under contractarianism. On a strict subjectivist reading, “you are wrong” amounts to “what you did conflicts with my values”. It is basically an expression of disapproval from my own standpoint. On a contractarian view, “you are wrong” is a different kind of move: it appeals to a shared standard. It means something like “you are violating the commonly accepted rules of behaviour that we rely on to coordinate, and that you are (or should be) aware of”. In other words, strict subjectivism treats moral criticism as fundamentally first-personal (“here is where I stand”), whereas contractarianism treats it as second-personal and intersubjective (“here is the rule we share or are proposing to share”).
On sexual ethics, I am also not saying everyone must have exactly the same views. Liberal societies tolerate a fair degree of pluralism in domains where coordination problems are weaker: people can hold different ideals about monogamy, polyamory, celibacy, and so on, as long as there is a minimal legal/ethical framework that protects consent, children’s welfare, and so forth. That is perfectly consistent with a contractarian picture: some domains demand tight convergence on common rules; others permit multiple equilibria and subcultures.
So my target is not “ordinary disagreement about reasons” or “tolerating different lifestyles”. It is the idea that morality as an institution can be understood simply as each person’s private “ethical truth”, without explaining how and why we end up with the shared rule systems that actually structure social life. On that point I suspect we may be closer than the word “subjectivism” suggests.
I think that what you call "relativism" and I call "subjectivism" have a lot in common. Although I don't discuss this in the article that I linked to, I think people acting solely on their own desires and with their own ethical truths ought to converge on shared rules due to the contractarian logic that you spell out, although contractarianism is a highly idealized account of how this happens. After all, people don't desire to be constantly in conflict with others, so they have an incentive to thrash out common laws and norms that enable them to live at peace with each other.
I also think that a society of subjectivists can critique the contract and the ethical commitments behind it based on their preferences and outcomes, as you say. I would also say that you can critique the contract for being based on false beliefs. Laws dividing society into castes typically rest on the notion that people of different castes are fundamentally biologically different, and this assumption can be challenged for being factually inaccurate.
I would also push back on the notion that violating a community's norms is necessarily wrong. After all, if you live in an unduly repressive society, then anger is appropriate. As I explain in my article, I would say that a better definition of a wrong action is an action that a reasonable person wouldn't want to do after deliberation. So you can violate the community's norms if you want to, but you had better think seriously about whether your commitment is based on justified beliefs and about how the community might try to punish you for violating its norms.
The fact someone can regard society as the actual enemy but still have moral standards indicates something other than social and moral standards being synonymous. The fact self-sacrificial altruism and doing the right thing even if this leads to personal disadvantage is considered a feature of morality indicates something other than self-interested game theoretic pay-offs as underlying moral intuitions(though doesn't argue against a social-evolutionary basis for morality in itself, bacteria seem to indicate such altruism is selected for even when evolution itself is the primary form of 'cognition' being undergone).
There was no movement against slavery in classical times. There was however notably the notion of a golden age in which no one was a slave.
I think this is exactly where the proximate/ultimate distinction matters. At the proximate level, I agree with you: people do not experience morality as self-interest calculations. They can see “society” as the enemy and still have strong moral standards, and self-sacrifice is often taken as the purest case of being moral. Our phenomenology of morality is about guilt, indignation, duty, loyalty, not about maximising payoffs. My claim is about the ultimate level: why do creatures with this kind of phenomenology exist at all? A contractarian/evolutionary story says that, over time, groups whose members converged on workable norms and enforcement (solving coordination and conflict problems) tended to do better than groups that did not. The selection pressure is on equilibrium properties and payoffs; the psychological vehicle that carries that equilibrium can quite naturally be a sense of “duty” or “doing the right thing even when it hurts”, not an explicit self-interest maximiser in anyone’s head.
The same applies to altruism. Proximately, people feel outrage, solidarity, compassion and act at a cost; they do not tell themselves “this raises my expected discounted utility”. Ultimately, though, it is unsurprising if selection has favoured types who are prepared to incur costs for principles in the kinds of repeated, reputation-laden interactions humans face. That does not mean “everyone is secretly selfish in their head”. It means that dispositions which look self-sacrificial from the inside can still be the outcome of selection on long-run payoffs at the level of individuals and groups. The interest discussion belongs at that explanatory level, not at the level of how moral motives feel from the first-person point of view.
I can see how many moral preferences and judgments (based on notions of fairness, justice, etc.) could be equilibria for creating a society that reduces conflict and favors cooperation. But what are your thoughts on moral duties and behavior towards non-human animals and other entities that are not in a position to bargain or to even interact with the humans that negotiate the social contract? Is our intuition that it is morally wrong to torture a bird for no good reason just an overgeneralization of a do no harm heuristic that was selected for with other humans in mind? So there is nothing wrong with a society in which all members agree that torturing birds is fine because (a) they all agree on it and (b) it does not affect cooperation/conflict in the society? Or is there some other reason why we should see this society as having sub-optimal moral rules?
Hey Bastian, I agree with your comment in principle, however, if you look at the state of modern agriculture and farming, it seems that animal harm/mistreatment is widely accepted.
There might come a time when the animal rights movement is able to garner more traction and make politicians sign regulations regarding animal conditions (which would be great) but until then, most us are probably living in a society that sees nothing wrong with torturing(overfeeding, crowding, forced breeding then separating the newborn calf from its mother...) animals for food.
Unfortunately, I think this example proves Lionel's point that we, as a society, collectively decide our morality, rules of cooperation, and actual law.
My problem as a historian is that multiple societies have reached states of equilibria that have lasted thousands of years without ever even once considering (by way of just one example) slavery morally wrong. The current “consensus” (scare quotes are there because plenty of places on the planet pay lip service the notion that slavery is immoral, but continue to practice it enthusiastically) that slavery is “bad” is a very recent phenomenon. Either way, slave societies have proved to be excellent at attaining states of social equilibrium throughout history. [The genocide example is even more telling: how many genocides have occurred since that UN definition was ratified?]
Thanks for the thought provoking piece. In this comment I want to raise two related issues having to do with the status of moral claims made by reformers which I do not think was adequately dealt with.
On social contractarianism, moral claims are true or false relative to a society’s moral code. Therefore, prior to society’s adoption of a moral it was false-relative to that society-that the moral was true. Therefore, all the moral claims of moral reformers are initially false. For instance, when slavery was common practice in the United States and some advocated for its abolition, there claim that slavery is wrong was false.
This may not be a knock down argument against social contractarianism but it definitely is inconsistent with pretheoretical moral judgements that, for instance, when abolitionists asserted that slavery was wrong, they were not saying something false. Any meta-ethical theory worth its salt will either find a way to block this revision of pretheoretical moral judgements or show why those pretheoretical judgements were mistaken and the cost of revision worthwhile. I wonder what you think of this proposal.
You write that “Nonetheless, in practice, moral language is often part of the bargaining and mobilization that makes a new agreement possible.” While your right that moral language is still used in the context of reform, this does not provide a solution to the problem. God may be shown not to exist by some body of evidence. When this evidence is presented to the believer he may remark that people will continue to believe in God and use religious language despite this. He may be correct but this is not relevant/does not address the evidence which his interlocutor has put forward against his claim. However, that moral language is used during political mobilization does shed light on a related issue. Not only is the moral language of reformers prior to the reforms they advocate for false but it is also true that insofar as anyone is convinced or persuaded by the reformer’s moral arguments, they are convinced or persuaded by false moral claims. For instance, insofar as anyone is convinced prior to the abolition of slavery that it is wrong because it is inconsistent with human autonomy and dignity prior are persuaded on the basis of a claim that is (or was) in fact false. While again I don’t think this is a knock down argument against contractarianism it is another way in which it would require a major revision to pretheoretical moral judgements.
If it is up to us, who among us decides? And why? Is it a gender, intelligence, ethnic, or experience based decision? Relational contracts are all too often a cost/benefit analysis. Self-interest underlies it all in which might becomes right and people become oppressed. The outcomes are on display today.
Hey Lionel, I thought this post was very insightful and addressed some of my points I had made in my own post: https://nicolasbuisson.substack.com/p/on-human-dignity
I found it very convincing and understand how morality constitutes the rules that the collective/society agrees upon to foster a social equilibrium like you explained.
One thing that came to mind as I was reading this, was that this social equilibrium of morality can change over time. Some moral principles may be considered traditional and respected for having stood the test of time but might be maladapted to the new conditions of our present day. Whether it be from technology, geopolitical events, political movements, internet trends... our culture and societies are constantly changing (faster and faster with the internet). I see political participation and being involved with your community as incredibly important; Being active allows you to voice your opinion and vote on what you believe the social equilibrium should be. Political participation and being a part of a community used to be 'automatic' in prior societies but nowadays it is much easier to limit your participation in society.
Additionally, this also made me think that this only applies to democracies or societies where people actually take into consideration others' point of view and want to cooperate. If we define morality as the set of rules (whether explicitly enforced through law or implicitly enforced through cultural norms) that leads to a social equilibrium, could we not see situations where a dominant party dictates and enforces a social equilibrium onto the rest of the group? I can think of multiple examples: any international law infringement, religious sects (example: FLDS cult leader Warren Jeffs), monopolies in business making things worse for their consumers... As an outsider, it is evident that these situations would be seen as immoral or wrong but I wonder if the people within (especially if they were born into this environment and never had exposure to anything else) could also view their social equilibrium as wrong? Would a situation such as those -- which will inevitably lead to more conflict be considered as an unstable social equilibrium?
This article almost reads like you're attempting to redefine "moral relativism" to mean what most people call moral realism.
Whenever people do things like that, my suspicion is that they're trying to pull a motte-and-bailey.
Hi Eugine, I don’t think this is a fair characterisation. The post explicitly situates itself in the usual metaethical terms: relativism versus realism. The conclusion is clearly against realism in that sense: it does not make sense to suppose the existence of unconditional, stance-independent oughts.
I can nonetheless take your comment as suggesting that my conclusion does not sound too far from how we experience morality. That is intentional. The aim is to explain morality as it actually works, so the view should preserve much of our everyday phenomenology of moral disagreement and criticism.
Rather than a motte-and-bailey, I would see the move as closer to going from geocentrism to heliocentrism: the underlying picture of what is really going on changes, and some theoretical commitments have to be abandoned, but our ordinary experience of the world is largely preserved and re-explained.
> Hi Eugine, I don’t think this is a fair characterisation. The post explicitly situates itself in the usual metaethical terms: relativism versus realism.
Yes, and than you insist that "relativism" doesn't mean any of the thinks the term is usually used to mean.
> The conclusion is clearly against realism in that sense:
Except that conclusion does not actually follow from your argument.
My suspicion of what's going on is that there some moral rules that you rejected and made that rejection part of your identity long before you ever learned about game theory or any of the other intricacies you mentioned in the article. Now it's likely the rules in question are indeed correct in the sense of being favorable to societies that adopt them, but since you don't want to admit that, you have to play these kind of games.
I am not sure I understand your psychological conjecture. But whatever the history of how I came to my present views, I think they should simply be criticised for what they are and how I put them forward.
I note that this post has not been convincing enough for you, and that is, in any case, useful information.
> But whatever the history of how I came to my present views, I think they should simply be criticised for what they are and how I put them forward.
That's what I was doing in my first comment, and the first half of my second.
Frankly, from an outside point of view the contradiction in your views is so glaring, that the only way they make sense is by reference to your intellectual history which explains your blind spots.