Subjective versus Objective Ethics
THE EMPHASIS ON NATURE as a source of moral or social wisdom is of course closely connected with the desire to establish the principles of conduct on an ‘objective’ basis, that is, to give them the same authority as the laws of nature established by the natural scientists; and this in its turn is due to the belief, present in all discussions on this topic, that unless this is done, the only sanction for this or that ethical or political rule will be ‘subjective’, that is, built upon such shifting sand as the individual tastes and inclinations of particular persons, in particular circumstances, at particular moments of their lives – that is, liable to change from person to person and moment to moment, and therefore incapable of forming the basis for permanent modes of behaviour either for individuals or for groups or nations.
Such subjectivity and relativity have never been regarded as fatal to, for example, aesthetic views or such codes as those of manners – or social habits adopted in free associations such as societies or clubs, in games, etiquette and so forth. But the rules of political and social behaviour, and above all of moral action, which are intended to govern men’s inner and outer lives, are obviously of supreme importance; and seem to require a more solid basis than the vagaries of individual temperament, or casual whims subject to transient influences. With the collapse of the authority of theology and scholastic metaphysics, and the accompanying disbelief in other such rationalist systems deriving from the Platonic or the Aristotelian traditions (owing to denial by empiricists of the special intellectual faculties presupposed by these systems), the peril of a chaos of conflicting individual opinions, with no criterion to decide between them, was a source of profound uneasiness, and at times alarm, in the eighteenth century, no less than in the nineteenth or the twentieth. When Hume denied that such rational faculties existed, and analysed ethical propositions as recording no more than the sentiments of individuals or groups (he never evolved any clear doctrine which distinguished between these two, nor related them unambiguously to the utilitarianism which he also supported in a general way), this was held in his day as in ours to reduce ethics to a set of subjective beliefs – in contrast with the objective beliefs of the scientists, or even of untutored common sense, about what kind of objects there are in the world and how such objects behave.
It seems clear that one of the principal motives for a search for an ‘objective’ ethics was the desire to escape from such subjectivism, not merely a desire for the secure knowledge which only the ‘objective’ seemed to promise – although this was strong enough – but also a perfectly sound recognition of the fact that there do exist sharp and profound differences between statements of personal taste or inclination and statements about the ends of life and the rights and duties of individuals. Such objective systems as those of Kant, of the Idealist philosophers, in particular Hegel and his German, British, Italian and American followers; the evolutionary ethics of the Darwinians, and no less the anti-naturalist ethics of G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica, and the schools of thought which followed him, not only in philosophical but in political and literary circles in England and elsewhere; the German phenomenologists and their disciples, and other related movements – all these were concerned to emphasise this deep difference and provide ethics, and by implication politics, with an ‘objective basis’.
Whatever the intrinsic merit of such doctrines, they partially stemmed from a profound misunderstanding of the revolution effected by Hume. Certainly he transformed the history of thought by his conclusive demonstration that ethical statements – as indeed all normative statements – differed from statements asserting a priori connections on the one hand, and those describing matters of fact upon the other; that of the two types of statement, the first depended for its validity upon the man-made, or at any rate man-accepted, rules which govern such artificial disciplines as logic, mathematics and the moves in games, that is, which ultimately derive from the way in which we choose to use words, symbols, counters or anything else; while the latter depended upon appeals to normal experience, for which ‘verification by the senses’ was perhaps too narrow a description, but which consisted in those empirical methods, whatever they might be in various situations, whereby we ascertain whether or not a statement about the world is true.
But normative statements, according to Hume, differed from both these categories inasmuch as their correctness depended neither upon the ways in which we choose to use the symbols with which we express ourselves, nor upon the kind of inspection needed for the verification of ordinary empirical statements. In the case of both these categories, the distinction between subjective and objective was clearly valid, and it was tantamount to distinguishing between the kinds of evidence upon which conclusions were founded or the kinds of methods by which they were reached. An objective statement of mathematics differed from a subjective one in using methods recognised as proper mathematical methods by mathematicians or other persons using mathematical methods – if they were reached by guess-work or mystical intuition or in an haphazard way, or believed with an obstinacy which repelled efforts to modify it by pointing out that the method used was not that which, by definition, was the sole method of mathematics, these views were described as capricious, irrational or subjective. Similarly, if anyone asserted that the earth was flat or that water never boiled, this was regarded as not merely untrue, but subjective, since it could not be certified by the empirical methods of investigation considered appropriate to the subject matter, that is, in terms of which truth in such matters was defined or understood.
But although Hume himself in effect tried to reduce ethics to psychology, that is, a branch of empirical fact asserting scientific or common-sense procedure, his argument can easily be shown to lead to a somewhat different conclusion. If one takes him literally, then an ethical proposition would be objective if it correctly described the state of mind of an individual or a group (its approvals or disapprovals, to use his not very happy terms) – that is, by using methods recognised to be appropriate to the discovery of such states of mind – and subjective if it failed to use such methods but employed some illicit, that is to say, not commonly recognised, mode of procedure. But, of course, the objections of those who felt the whole of ethics to be rendered subjective despite this distinction were not thereby removed. If all that was being referred to were passing moods or variable approvals or disapprovals – almost likes or dislikes – whether of groups or individuals, the foundation of ethics seemed dreadfully uncertain.
This rests upon a fallacy. For if what is felt is that this sort of subjectivity of normative statements – the rules and ideals of political, social or personal life – somehow renders them more precarious, less authoritative, weaker, because bound up with the unpredictable fluctuations of the emotional life of the individual, this implies a belief that what they lack is an ‘objective’ element which could stabilise them; in other words, that whereas the ethical principles of our fathers used to be firm, true for all time, as rock-like as those of algebra, now the basis of all this has been removed, and we are plunged in a sea of doubt and vacillation without a rule or compass. We feel robbed of something, gravely impoverished; something which used to be objective has been degraded to being merely subjective. We may still want to believe that ethics are objective, but Hume’s remorseless logic has refuted this belief, and we must have the courage to face the painful conclusion to which our premisses have driven us. Given this state of mind, it is not surprising if those who seek for permanent principles of political or social action denounce Humeism as subverting the moral order and leading to disillusionment, cynicism and a heartless and opportunistic pragmatism.
The fallacy of this position consists in the tacit assumption that ethics, which is, alas, subjective, might in principle have been objective, although it has been shown by Hume’s cold reasoning not to be so in fact. But if Hume is right, at any rate in maintaining that normative statements cannot be describing entities called values which exist in the world, which have independent being in the sense in which things or events or persons can be said to do – because the notion of such objective values proved, upon examination, to be unintelligible – then he is in effect implying (though he never himself saw this clearly enough) that ethical statements are in principle different in the way they are used from logical or descriptive statements, and the distinction between subjective and objective may turn out to not apply to them at all.
Kant and some among the German Idealists had a glimpse of this in supposing normative statements to be not statements of fact at all, but orders, commands, ‘imperatives’, deriving neither from an artificial convention, like mathematics, nor from the observation of the world, like empirical statements. And if we follow this line of thought, it becomes clear that normative statements fail to be subjective not in the sense that they might have been objective, but in the sense that they are wholly different from the kind of statements (or beliefs or thoughts) to which the distinction between subjective and objective applies. My view that murder is wrong is merely subjective. Why ‘merely’? What could make it objective? What is it that a subjective statement lacks, the presence of which would make it objective, so that we feel justified in applying to it the restricting adverb ‘merely’, which seems to deprive it of a property which it vainly seeks but cannot have? Can a world be conceived in which normative statements acquired ‘objective status’? It is only when we realise that this is a meaningless suggestion – that the note of regret which the word ‘subjective’ often expresses springs from what has been called a ‘pseudo-lament’, because it deplores the absence not of something which could be present (although prevented from being so by empirical or metaphysical causes), but of something whose presence cannot be conceived, of which to say that it is present is to utter a meaningless phrase – it is only then that we grasp the unsuitability of such an epithet as ‘subjective’ when applied to ethical, political or other normative disciplines.
Political statements are not subjective in the sense of not being objective – for the reader must ask himself what it would be like to transform, by whatever species of metaphysical magic, the answer to the question ‘Why should I obey the government?’ into something ‘objective’. When he has failed to do this, he will understand that whatever the truth about how such questions and their answers function, about what the correct questions are and how the correct answers to them are to be obtained, it is not the case that some theories can maintain that the answers are objective – and that this is comforting but false – and that other theories can maintain that the answer is necessarily subjective – and that this may be upsetting but has the advantage of being true. He will realise – though this requires some intellectual effort on the part of those brought up in a different tradition – that value statements, for example the statements of politics, are neither subjective nor objective, but wholly different in kind from the kinds of statements which are so.
A clear understanding of this should dissipate the feelings of insecurity and moral impoverishment which the relation of propositions hitherto considered firm, eternal and objective to the class of uncertain, relative and subjective statements has so often induced. The tendency to call political principles objective derives, as we said above, partly from the correct realisation of their great importance in the conduct of life. This importance is not diminished or altered by a clearer realisation of the confusion about their logical status. They remain as important or unimportant as before, but are neither subjective nor objective: they are sui generis, to be assessed by methods appropriate to them (as indeed they always have been, save by those obsessed by a misleading metaphysical view), and no longer capable of being modified on the ground that they are merely subjective and therefore lack sufficient authority. The principles by which men live and act, the ends for which they fight and die, are what they are, whether or not they are valid, and whatever constitutes valid ity in this sphere, and they lose nothing in sacredness because they are no longer misleadingly described in terms or categories which do not apply to them. Scepticism, cynicism and the rest seem to be the consequences not of a disconcertingly clear view of the facts, but of the confusions which frequently follow from false analogies with other regions of experience, such as, in this case, mathematics, physics and history. That is Hume’s abiding service in the history of human thought: his argument is as fatal to subjectivism and relativism in ethics as to its equally unintelligible opposite.