Morality isn't a concept that can be discussed in a single sentence. It's complex, so I apologize for this initial wall of text. This is why I say morality is subjective.


Morality has two components. One is the internal mechanisms that govern how people behave; emotions such as empathy, guilt, embarrassment, shame, love. These mechanisms kick in without conscious effort. In a normal person, if they do something wrong, they will feel guilt. Of course people are extremely variant, and some can suppress guilt or empathy(we call them sociopaths or psychopaths). But in your average person, these mechanisms function automatically.



The second component concerns our rules. This is where it gets complicated. Think of the total codified set of all possible moral/immoral actions. If you place them on a gradient from most severe to least severe, you’d have murder/torture on one end, and perhaps minor fraud/adulterous thoughts on the other end.

Towards the severe end of the spectrum, studies have shown that people have an innate sense of what is right and what is wrong. Even infants too young to speak express empathy when another person feels pain. They don’t need to be told that “hurting someone is wrong.” The empathy is automatic. These rules are unanimously agreed upon for that reason.

As the gradient shifts to the less severe, we find that the rules must increasingly be taught. If a person isn’t taught that taking $20 from the til at the end of their shift(and somehow they aren’t able to figure out that the behavior is wrong), then they won’t feel guilt. The point is, in order for the above mentioned “mechanisms” to kick in toward the less severe end of the spectrum, we must ‘know’ what is right and what is wrong; it must be taught.

So how do we agree on what is moral? For the severe acts, it is innate. There is reciprocity in everything we do. I know that if another person gets cut, they feel pain just like I do. If I am ever in the situation where I’m cut and need help, I would want a stranger to help me. Therefore, I help people in need. This reasoning is supplemented by empathy. This reasoning is also expressed in game theory, where evolutionary stable strategies(ESS’s) determine how an individual should behave to benefit himself by benefitting his group(you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours).

For the less severe acts, they must be reasoned out. Over time as a society, we come to agree on what is right and what is wrong. We have society-wide deliberations over these things. We’ve come to agree that slavery is wrong. We’ve come to agree that treating women unequally is wrong. We’ve come to agree(at least most of us) that treating LBGT’s is wrong. These items did not jump out to us out of the aether from some objective source. They are products of collective agreement, where we each deliver our reasoning behind our positions. This is what it means to say the root of morality is subjective.

Such deliberation in philosophical circles has long since been formalized. There are schools of ethics and morality. Here are a few links.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/morality-definition/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/

I'll get back to you on this.It's late night in my part of the globe.As a Christian I don't think morality is subjective but derivative from a creator.I'll get to your definitions and arguments another time.

I think human morality has both subjective and objective components.

Evidence shows that there's a biological basis to moral behavior. Many so-called "human" traits of fairness, reciprocity and altruism are clearly evident in apes and other social animals. Scientists, including Frans De Waal and Edward O. Wilson, have written much about the necessity for all social animals to constrain or alter behavior in order to accommodate group living. There's a mathematical basis for it as well as described in game theory.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/game-ethics/

This, our basic wiring, is arguably the objective aspect of human morality. Obviously, our basic wiring is very flexible. Most of us believe that killing is wrong, but there are obviously loopholes to accommodate certain circumstances. For example, we will kill others If our own survival is at stake or in times of war or if we are protecting members of our own family.

Most laws in civilized nations merely augment our basic wiring, spelling out specific criteria in order to maintain order in society. These are clearly a more subjective aspect of human morality. For example, we have laws against insider trading and copyright infringement, areas for which we have no natural or innate sense of proper ethical behavior. Most of us are against stealing, but studies show that it becomes much easier for us to steal in cases such as downloading MP3s when we are far removed from the victim or if we perceive the victim is not hurt by the crime. We are flexible when it comes to morality. The Bible commands us not to steal, but people do steal all the time. That's why we have to make laws against it as a little extra insurance and to ensure an orderly society which most of us do want. So as Thomas Hobbes has shown, we are willing to give up some of our freedoms in order to preserve civilized society. I see this as a form of game theory, a game of Prisoner's Dilemma that we're playing witho0ut realizing it.

Other laws merely augment a sense of right and wrong which is already innate. For example, we seem to have a built-in repulsion against incest and pedophilia and even homosexuality. As such, we would expect such behaviors outlawed by our religions and secular law. This codification, however, is obviously subjective because we recognize that some of our innate responses, including prejudice towards people of other colors, are wrong. We can override some of our basic instincts, recognizing for example that some people are born homosexual and that two homosexuals engaging in consensual sex shouldn't be ostracized or discriminated against.

This codification, however, is obviously subjective because we recognize that some of our innate responses, including prejudice towards people of other colors, are wrong.

If the free-floating rationale of game theory means that many acts are objective, I think homosexuality aversion would still count. Objective but wrong rather than subjective. But if the meaning shifts on any items we previously thought were eternally immoral, what's to say any of it is truly permanent? Would that mean it's all subjective, but there are objective roots?


In-group and out-group behavioral differences also complicate the subject. I don't think either of us mentioned it.

Interbane wrote:

This codification, however, is obviously subjective because we recognize that some of our innate responses, including prejudice towards people of other colors, are wrong.

If the free-floating rationale of game theory means that many acts are objective, I think homosexuality aversion would still count. Objective but wrong rather than subjective. But if the meaning shifts on any items we previously thought were eternally immoral, what's to say any of it is truly permanent? Would that mean it's all subjective, but there are objective roots?

In-group and out-group behavioral differences also complicate the subject. I don't think either of us mentioned it.

Well, our tendency to prejudge others based on skin color is definitely an in-group mode of thinking. We instinctively see those that are different than us as a threat. From an evolutionary psychology standpoint it seems so obvious why we are wired to regard strangers, whether it's skin color or the strangeness of their customs, with some trepidation. There was a time when the arrival of other tribes would pose a very dangerous situation to our ancestors. By recognizing such innate modes of thinking, we can make a conscious decision to rise above the hardwiring. To me that's the beauty of such insight. We can recognize those feelings and see that they aren't applicable to modern life where we have quite a lot of blending of a lot of cultures and races. But it does take a second to make that very conscious decision. There must be many such unconscious feelings, outdated modes of thinking, that have no place in the modern world,.

Great topic, Interbane. I made this thread the "Featured Article" on our Home page.

yeah, thought provoking stuff. thanks all.

i should think more, but just dwelling on the whole concept is mindblowing.

my first gut reaction was, both, subjective AND objective, but as i started to think on it many questions arose.

then i found myself thinking things like

who's morality mine or someone else's

and

imposed morality vis a vis voluntary morality

then things like

sometimes i'm very moral sometimes very immoral

and then

one persons morality is anothers immorality

so now i guess that's leaning more to the subjective

but then leaning the other way

do unto others as you would that they should do unto you (lol at the KJV)

i mean the golden rule which predates the bible by centuries in case somebody tries to kidnap it for jesus.

this morality business is fascinating.

do unto others as you would that they should do unto you

I see objectivity there. A free-floating rationale that applies not only to humans, but to every higher-order species. A free-floating rationale is like an emergent property of the universe; a behavioral algorithm that always applies under certain conditions. It's beneficial to the individual to treat others how they wish to be treated. We have a sense of this reciprocity because it's been beneficial to our survival. The reasons it's beneficial to our survival are complex, and the answers from what I've seen are in the domain of game theory. The mathematical nature of the universe, expressed in more complex algorithms.

There is also an argument to be made that when we document our moral codes, we therefore 'objectify' them. When information is placed onto a medium, it can be considered objective. When we write down our knowledge, it becomes objective knowledge. If we codify a moral system that precisely matches what game theory and moral philosophy calculates is best, and also accords with common consensus, it would be the closest we can come to having objective morality.

so much of government i find very immoral (murder, war, suppression, corruption, policy that favours the rich etc etc)

so much of advertising (pushing psychological hot buttons to trick people into buying a crap product)

so much of speech (deceptive agenda, ego defense)

corporations are frequently extremely immoral (exxon, haliburton, monsanto etc etc)

institutions can be very immoral. (modern medicine pushing horrid chemicals with shocking side effects, law, education etc etc)

it's hard to say to someone "be moral" in a society that is riddled with lies and confusion and immorality of every kind. (not to mention incompetence and ineptitude.)

for example if someone works for a company that pays them wages they can't live on and treats them like dirt or worse than dirt it's hard to say "you have done an immoral thing" when they take $20 out of the till and don't seem to care for the company who just payed the manager a 10,000 dollar bonus for cutting everyone's hours.

another example

if you added up every dollar stolen by "bank robbers" in a given year, it wouldn't be a drop in the ocean compared to what bankers themselves steal from the general populace in a given year.

in a world riddled with immorality, lies and bad bad bad thinking, how can morality make any headway. (and yet, in my life it does)

not many people want to be the ONLY person doing the right thing in a given situation.

that would be personal morality (my favourite kind) ie. "doing the right thing" as you see it in spite of your self interest.

then you get legalism where people get so obsessed with "doing the right thing" that it becomes the wrong thing.

overly enforced outward righteousness that leads to inward hypocrisy.

Interbane’s question puts us in front of a very interesting, complicated and important subject. A post will not do justice to it, but I will try to add something meaningful to this discussion.

The first point to clarify is what is meant by ‘objective’ in the question first asked as I notice that there might be different underlying interpretations of it from the above. Is it simply innate what is meant by objective? Or is it something more such as some mathematical optimization of a certain utility (formulated in game theory or other problem-solving techniques) that is coded in our genes through evolution? And in any of the two cases, is it something that is unchangeable with time or is it something subject to change?

Saying that we have a genetic baggage we are born with that influences our decision-making (and hence morality) is stating the obvious; however, most of us would also agree (and it is something quite well documented scientifically in the long debate between Nature vs. Nurture) that our decision-making is also influenced by the environment we grew in and currently live in (in the form of response to environmental incentives) and that, as geo rightly said, our action is often (not always) regulated by certain cognitive processes we refer to under the umbrella terms of consciousness and awareness which do override otherwise impulsive and instinctual attitudes we might have. These cognitive processes are in turn honed by this general environment, which we will call Culture (the term commonly used by anthropologists).

Now, how about looking at things from the angle of mathematical optimization? Any optimization exercise (or game theory problem) requires a definition of the utility in question we are trying to optimize – so the difficulty with this approach is in saying what are these utilities that are being optimized, how are they defined in the first place, do they change with time, and what is the order of priority they are subject to? Kant thought himself capable of showing how all such questions can be answered rationally and how we can come up with a discovery (i.e. it exists ‘objectively’ or ‘a priori’, we just have to find it) of this morality that transcends everything else. No one has succeeded in doing so – mathematical optimization simply moves the difficulty from one area to another. Even something like one’s Survival is not a utility that is as universal as we first think – there are many examples of cultures and situations where moral behavior is at odds with Survival no matter how we end up defining it. Side note: I invite those who have time to read Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality – I do not agree with everything in it but it is a great work when it comes to the subject of Morality nevertheless.

I will finish by saying that there seems to be something curious and interesting about the social mammals that we are. Unlike other animals around us, we seem to need Culture more than any other specie in order to operate effectively; we depend more on Culture and it is not a mere nice addition from an anthropological point of view. Other animals reach maturity much faster than us, and they learn what to do in a faster way than us, relying less in the process on the environment created by their peers. Morality is part of Culture, and as there are many cultures, there are many moralities with various degrees of commonality. There may be some things that most moralities have rejected but that does not mean that morality is one objective code or that everybody holds the same ‘natural’ morality across times and communities. Power dynamics and social considerations influence morality greatly and many of these are perpetuated in subtle manners with time (such as aristocratic morality, populous morality etc.).

In our age of cosmopolitanism, the important questions then become: if different groups have different moralities, on which basis are they supposed to interact with each other? And should we force some common denominators of morality globally and how? But that is a whole other interesting topic by itself…




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