3 Strong Arguments Against Moral Subjectivism

A lot of atheists seem to take moral subjectivism for granted--almost as if it doesn't have any issues. In this video, I give 3 strong arguments against moral subjectivism. No one should hold this view!

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#Morality #Apologetics #MoralSubjectivism

[CarltonWinston]

I get barely a minute and a half in and you're already muddying the waters. The two examples you gave to tell the difference between an emotional response and a preferential response is just flat wrong. Preferences are reliant on emotions. "Abortion is wrong" is no different from "Abortion: Boo!". Not one bit. It still shows that you dislike abortion and you prefer people not get abortions. From my observation, it doesn't seem like you've really thought that point through. You may just be regurgitating what you might have heard from people that happen to kind of agree with your position.


Argument 1: Saying "Abortion is right" isn't necessarily saying "I approve of abortion". It may actually be saying "I believe it is right to allow people to choose what they can and can't do with their bodies". Again, I'm not sure you've actually given thought to what you're trying to disprove here. Perhaps I'm just misunderstanding what you're trying to get across here. Things aren't that black and white. I also don't understand how recognizing you disagree with someone goes against moral subjectivism? If anything, it further points out that morals are subjective because different people have differing opinions. In my opinion, your first argument fails completely.


Argument 2: How is this a knock against moral subjectivism? Where does it say that if you accept moral subjectivism, you accept that your moral judgments are LITERALLY infallible? I'm not aware of anyone who says that aside from solipsists and religious people? This argument felt very incoherent and even more flawed than the first


Argument 3: A better example of a contradiction would have been: "This sentence is false". Moral subjectivism, from what I understand, never makes the claim nor implies that everyone has rational beliefs or preferences. Where are you getting this? If you're arguing for moral objectivism, doesn't that suffer more from your three arguments? Moral objectivism states that there is only ONE infallible objective set of preferences that everyone shares and that is true all across reality. That can't be true because there are contradictions and we all recognize that people have different "moral preferences". I'm not sure what you're arguing in this video and I don't think you understand what you're arguing here.

[SteveMcRae]

I, like many had previously noted, a a few issues with this video...
1) First minor quibble, as I don't like the title nor the argument wording as Moral Subjectivism can not be "true" or "false" as it isn't a proposition. One could use these arguments to argue moral subjectivism is not correct, I would not make it a truth apt proposition.
2) "genuine moral disagreement"...while one can legitimately be used to argue against moral subjectivism as "moral subjectivism" is special case with respect to the individual vs a culture or society, "genuine moral disagreement" is most often used to argue against moral relativism...but in either case it isn't some type of magical defeater to moral relativism nor moral subjectivism. It merely is asking, if we have genuine moral disagreement, then how do we decide what is morally permissible and not permissible. The moral subjectivist agrees there are moral facts, but would argue those facts are based upon personal preference, bias and not objective where something would be true without intersubjective agreement.
3) Simple subjectivism and emotivism are such that the subjectivist is merely reporting ones attitude towards a proposition. iIf I state "Stealing is wrong" would be me disapproving of stealing, and the moral noncogntivist position of emotivism would be more expressing an attitude towards stealing (Stealing...Boo!) but isn't actually reporting any attitude I actually have towards a the proposition as in emotivism "stealing is wrong" isn't a truth apt proposition.
4) The The Argument Against Moral Infallibility holds that subjectivism our moral judgment are always true assuming we are being honest, and thus in "Infallible", but we of course are fallible seemingly showing that moral subjectivism is not correct. (Note: emotivism does eliminate this seeming problem as moral statements are not T nor F and thus a person can not be "infallible" with respect to any specific moral proposition.). The way I think i would resolve this argument is to argue that our infallibility only extends to the belief that our moral judgment is true, in that it is true we believe "stealing is wrong" is true...not the the proposition is infallibly true or not.
5) There are "true contradictions" in dialetheism, but this seems to be arguing more against moral absolutism.

[tabula_rasa.]

You're talking as if " right ", " True and " wrong ", " false " is definite and absolute.

[benjaminschooley]

And this ladies and gentlemen is the kind of logical reasoning that was applied to dunking women in water to determine if they were witches or not..

[colinguyan]

Comedy gold!!!! Badly define subjectivism and then make bad arguments against something you just made up. Anyhoo No, 4 was really good.
"If moral subjectivism were true, then all our moral judgements would be infallible."
This is exactly the opposite of what it means, objective morality would be infallible, yet christians disagree on morality. HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE? If god wrote it on your heart how can you disagree?
Overall a good video showing how flawed moral objectivism is.

[madmax]

The understanding of moral subjectivism is entailed in its description; moral assessments are subjectively true, which is to say they are dependent on the attitudes of people. “Spinache tastes terrible” can be a correct assessment to an individual, but it may not necessarily be correct to another individual. Thus moral statements (under moral subjectivism) are true or false in regards to individuals, their personal tastes and their values.

Argument: “Moral subjectivism can’t account for genuine moral disagreement”.
Premise 1: If moral subjectivism were true, then there would be no genuine moral disagreement

Objection: What is the meaning of “genuine” here? A reasonable and non-question begging understanding would be that it’s a substitute for “objectively true”, which would leave us with: “Moral subjectivism can’t account for [objectively true] moral disagreement” which is a trivial observation since under the subjectivist view, there is no such thing as objectively true moral assessments over which to disagree. This is not a problem unless objectively true moral assessments can be demonstrated to be an actual thing and since they haven't been, premise 2 fails - there are no objectively true moral disagreements.

Objection: If Person A thinks abortion is moral and Person B thinks abortion is immoral, then clearly they have come to conflicting conclusions on the act of abortion (disagreement) which is not magically erased because they both acknowledge the other thinks differently. The complaint here seems to be that they disagree but somehow don't disagree because they acknowledge the other disagrees - which seems to be a nonsensical argument.

Argument: If moral subjectivism is true, it renders all our moral judgments infallible.

Objection: Under moral subjectivism, there can be no moral infallibility other than failure to not know one's own thoughts. It will have to be explained how knowing one's own thoughts without error is in any way "presumptuous" - it rather seems to be an unavoidable fact. I would agree that infallibility is presumptuous in regards to objective facts, however it is not been demonstrated that moral assessments are objective facts and until that happens, the argument appears to widely miss the mark.

Argument: Moral subjectivism is incoherent.
Premise 1: If moral subjectivism were true, then there would be true contradictions.

Objections: What is meant by "true" here? Objectively true? Under moral subjectivism, there would be no objectively true moral contradictions by definition. There couldn't be since moral assessments would all be subjective, meaning at best there could only be subjective contradictions, possibly by irrational persons, and since moral subjectivism does not argue that persons are always rational, any observation that they are not always rational does not in any way affect moral subjectivism.

I find these objections to moral subjectivism do not stand up under scrutiny.

[johncart]

Forget moral subjectivism, you need to do a video on the distinction between subjective and objective. We need to start there, that is were the disconnect lies.

[Ozzyman]

Morality has always been a huge problem for religion. A religious person can be moral, but they have no way to explain, through faith, why any act is right or wrong. See how badly apologists fail on this. Or can any apologist manage it? All true morality is humanistic.

[DavidWMiller]

You've lost me on the first argument. You seem to be conflating the idea of "genuine disagreement" with the idea of "one of them thinks they are objectively correct", and that's not what genuine disagreement means. You're using the conclusion of objectivism to determine the definition of genuine, making the premise flawed.

Under subjectivism, there can be genuine disagreement, and there is. If what you really mean is that there can not be objective disagreement, then you're right. And there isn't. The disagreement is subjective.

Also worth noting that subjective morals is not an atheist position. Plenty of atheists who feel it's reasonable to conclude objective morals based on the natural world, though I think that's a bit of a stretch and you have to get a bit squirrely with the meaning of objective.

[jacksfavorite]

I have no clue what any of that pertains to.

[Eraser]

Nice strawman, Cameron. Maybe try next time to argue against real moral subjectivism?

[sebradfield]

I find this to be a little dishonest. The arguments against moral subjectivity aren't being made because of an actual interest in a philosophical concept, but rather to "prove" something which cannot be proven, i.e. the existence of a god, and not just any god but a particular God. The problem lies in the point that none of these arguments mean anything unless that God is real. If it's not, then the arguments have neither meaning nor value. You believe your God is real, and therefore this argument has meaning, but to get back to the bottom line you have no evidence for the existence of your God (or any other), so you attempt to use the argument as evidence, which it is not. It's just an exercise in philosophy, nothing more. As such it gets you nowhere.

[darrylelam]

Wow another video showing that this guy has no clue what he is talking about.

[cynicthehedgehog]

You’re confusing the facts of what people’s opinions are with whether there’s any possible “truth” in morals
Morals can neither be true nor false, because morals are values assigned to actions by agents. Just like prices can be neither true nor false, except that a particular store could lie about how much they charge for a product. The store could charge for a spoon, but there’s not “truth” or “falsehood” about whether is the “true” price of that spoon. If, however, the store charges for that spoon but an employee of the store claims it costs $10 dollars, that person has lied because its true that the store values the spoon at Not because the spoon has a “true” value of
Emotivism... I don’t think that fully matters, it’s sort of an appeal to emotion, and I try to avoid those. I don’t prefer actions that make me happy, and conversely I don’t oppose actions that make me sad. I oppose actions that do harm to agents or living entities. I’m hardwired by my biology to fight for the well-being of my closest fellows, whether I like it or not. If that weren’t true, humans wouldn’t have evolved to be the group we are. And I do understand religion had a hand in that, in that religion provided a sort of structure for societies use to build themselves. Religions typically developed before governments in human history. But when we recognize morality as a tool that can be adjusted and honed to make everyone’s lives better, and not as a divine doctrine, we can move to the next step in societal progress and begin to rid ourselves of the tribalism religion demands, which would be beautiful. So no, Christianity is not true. And morality can only progress and improve when Christians recognize this. And muslims and Hindus and Buddhists as well. Every religion has outlived its usefulness.

[spigone]

Only a christian can make a video about philosophy with such little understandings of basics terminology

[thomasdoubting]

Is there ANYTHING more subjective than religious morality?
"Obey my prophet! ... unless I send a lying spirit to trick him..."
With instructions like that you can't even bake a cake

[erics]

The problem is from Gods perspective he literally has “Individualist Moral Subjectivism”. But ok.

[kaboomgoo]

Regardless of what one believes, I hope no one takes this video seriously.
I didn't even get through his first argument and my head was hurting.
The amount of assertion built into each premise is nuts. If anything this video makes believe not that morals are subjective.

[rustyblonchjr]

I don't see how morality is objective whether god exist or not

[sandsmarc]

Stating “I approve of abortion and agree that Sally disapproves of abortion” implicitly recognizes a disagreement. If one approves of what someone else disapproves of, there is moral disagreement and the stage is set for debate. Also, the statement “moral subjectivism is false” is incoherent. It isn’t true or false, it is simply a phenomenon that exists and has been observed and specified.