Moral Subjectivism

Core Idea

Moral subjectivism claims that moral facts depend on individual subjects' attitudes, preferences, or beliefs. A simple version reduces 'X is wrong' to 'I disapprove of X' or 'most people disapprove of X.' More sophisticated versions ground morality in rational agents' coherent preferences or idealized desires. Subjectivism struggles to explain persistent moral disagreement and the intuitive objectivity of some ethical convictions.

How It's Best Learned

Test the subjectivist account against your own moral reasoning: when you judge something wrong, do you feel you are merely reporting your preference, or responding to something normative beyond it?

Common Misconceptions

Not all subjectivists accept that individual whim determines morality; many refine the view using idealized preferences, coherence requirements, or rational perspectives to avoid obvious relativistic conclusions.

Explainer

You already know that moral anti-realism denies the existence of objective moral facts — facts that hold independently of any mind's attitudes or responses. Moral subjectivism is the most direct anti-realist position: it claims that moral statements are made true or false by the attitudes of individual subjects. When you say "cruelty is wrong," the subjectivist interprets this as something like "I disapprove of cruelty" — a report of your psychological state, not a claim about the world independent of you. This makes moral judgments truth-apt (they can be true or false) but grounds their truth entirely in the subject's mental life.

The appeal of subjectivism is its explanatory economy. It explains why moral views vary so widely across individuals and cultures without appealing to mysterious moral facts: people simply have different attitudes. It also fits neatly with a naturalistic picture of the world — no special faculty of moral perception is needed, because moral "knowledge" is just self-knowledge about your own preferences. Simple subjectivism says "X is wrong" means "I, the speaker, disapprove of X." But this immediately runs into a problem: it makes it impossible to genuinely disagree about ethics. If you say "torture is wrong" and I say "torture is not wrong," simple subjectivism entails we are both just reporting our attitudes — which means we are *not actually contradicting each other*, just as "I like coffee" and "I don't like coffee" said by two different people aren't contradictory.

Sophisticated subjectivists try to rescue the view by refining whose attitudes matter. Ideal observer theories ground moral truth in what a fully informed, impartial, rational agent would approve. Coherentist subjectivism says moral truths track what follows from your own considered, fully coherent preference set. These moves restore something that looks like moral objectivity — your moral beliefs can be *wrong* relative to your own idealized preferences — while still grounding morality in subjects rather than in mind-independent facts. The cost is that the view becomes increasingly complex and may start to look more like a form of constructivism than a pure subjectivism.

The deepest challenge to all subjectivist positions is the moral phenomenology problem: when people make moral judgments, they typically do not *feel* like they are merely reporting a personal attitude. Judging that the Holocaust was wrong does not feel like reporting a distaste for anchovies. The conviction carries a sense of binding, agent-independent normative force that subjectivism struggles to capture. This is why many philosophers who reject full moral realism turn instead to expressivism (which denies that moral statements are truth-apt at all) or constructivism (which grounds moral facts in rational procedures rather than mere attitudes). Understanding where subjectivism succeeds and fails maps the terrain of the whole metaethical debate.