Ethics is Objective

Ethics is a funny topic. It runs deep with a lot of people. I’m an ethicist, and I’m surprised by how important it is to others. At the same time, I find people are often (non-culpably) confused about the nature of ethics. 

Take, for instance, Scott Hartley’s recent book, The Techies and the Fuzzies. The title comes from a distinction that he reports having learned at Stanford, where the engineers refer to the non-engineers as the “fuzzies.” Scientists and technologists deal with cold, hard facts, and the fuzzies deal with…fuzzy things? Emotions and feelings, I suppose. Subjectivity. Hot, soft, non-facts.

As a philosopher, and as an ethicist more specifically, I’m meant to be a fuzzy. But I’m not fuzzy, and neither is ethics. And it's important we get clear on this. We are increasingly facing ethical dilemmas not only in our personal lives but also in our business lives, particularly in the face of emerging technologies like AI, VR/AR, and biotech. If we think of ethics as subjective or fuzzy, as being disconnected from truth and facts and rigorous inquiry, then suddenly ethical inquiry isn't something we can do to solve our ethical quandaries. But rigorous ethical inquiry is the only tool we have. If it doesn't work, we're at a loss.

In over 15 years of teaching philosophy I’ve noticed three primary drivers of the view that ethics is subjective. Each of them is wrong. In this article I'll present them before explaining why they are misguided.

Quick note: these are the most widespread reasons for thinking ethics is fuzzy/subjective/non-factual. They are not the only ones. So this article isn't an attempt to prove that ethics is objective (apologies for the clickbait title). It's an attempt to show that very popular reasons for thinking it is subjective are very bad reasons. If we should think ethics really is subjective, it will have to be for reasons that are much stronger than the ones typically advanced in favor of that view.

Reason #1 that Ethics is Fuzzy

People engage in ethical disputes; they disagree about whether abortion and capital punishment are morally permissible, whether there is or ought to be a right to healthcare, whether you should lie to the police to protect your friend, and so on. And since there is so much disagreement – so many different moral and ethical beliefs – ethics is fuzzy. More specifically, all this disagreement and variance in belief shows us that there’s no truth to the matter. That’s what its fuzziness consists in: ethics does not exist in the realm of truth and falsehood; there are no moral or ethical facts.

Reason #2 that Ethics is Fuzzy

Science, and more specifically, the scientific method, is the only way we discover truths about the world. Empirical observations (“seeing is believing”) and investigations (scientific experiments, for instance) deliver facts about the world. Everything else is interpretation, which is to say, subjective. Again, ethics is fuzzy because empirical observations have a monopoly on truth; ethics and ethical inquiry, because it is not empirical inquiry, concerns the realm of non-truth. In short: 

Only scientifically verifiable claims are true.

Reason #3 that Ethics is Fuzzy

Who’s to say what’s right and wrong? You have your beliefs and I have mine and that other person has theirs. And it’s not like we have scientific evidence that one view is right and another is wrong, so who’s to say what’s right and what’s wrong? It’s all subjective. Or in short: 

If there are ethical truths then there must be an authority figure who makes

this right and that wrong.

Untangling the Confusion

Each of these widespread reasons for thinking that ethics is fuzzy or subjective or not in the realm of truth and falsity are very bad reasons.

Why Reason #1 is Bad

The first reason – that ethics is fuzzy because different people have different moral beliefs and (thus) they disagree with each other – has at least two problems.

First, it fails to distinguish between moral beliefs, on the one hand, and morality, on the other. Look: we standardly distinguish between beliefs about a subject matter and the matter about which we have beliefs. There’s our belief about whether the earth is flat or round, on the one hand, and there’s the actual shape of the earth, on the other. There’s our belief about the chemical composition of water, on the one hand, and there’s the actual chemical composition of water, on the other. Put abstractly, we generally distinguish between our beliefs about X and what X is actually like.

Given this general distinction, it’s natural to think that there are our moral beliefs about X, on the one hand, and what X is actually morally like, on the other. So we can have our beliefs, but just as believing that the earth is flat doesn’t make it flat, believing that abortion is wrong doesn’t make it wrong.

Now maybe it’s different with ethics. But someone who wants to claim it’s different with ethics – such that this general distinction between beliefs about X vs. facts about X doesn’t hold when we talk about ethics – will have to give us a pretty strong argument for their claim. Frankly, I know of no such argument.

The second reason that disagreement in the realm of ethics is a bad reason for thinking ethics is fuzzy also takes us to a general principle. Consider:

If people disagree about X then there’s no truth to the matter about X.

Now that principle is obviously false. People disagree about all sorts of things about which there’s a truth to the matter. People disagree about whether humans are the product of evolution, whether self-driving cars will replace human-driven cars within a decade, whether there’s something at the center of a black hole, and even whether the earth is flat or spherical. But no one thinks, ‘Well, guess there’s no truth to the matter about the shape of the earth!”

The lesson is this: The fact that people disagree about X doesn’t show that there’s no truth to the matter about X.

And so, too, with ethics. The fact that people disagree about the morality of abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia, etc. doesn’t show that there’s no truth to the matter about those issues.

‘But’, it will be said, ‘it’s different with ethics. That’s an exception to the principle’. 

But why should we think it’s different with ethics? Why should we think it’s exempt from the lesson we just learned about disagreement and truth?

The common reply? ‘Because in those other cases of disagreement they can be scientifically settled. With ethics, there’s no scientific discovery.’ 

That’s a fine reply, I suppose. But it’s really an abandonment of the first reason for thinking ethics is fuzzy and a retreat to Reason #2 for thinking ethics is fuzzy. The reply just says, “Only scientifically verifiable claims are true.” So let’s investigate that.

Why Reason #2 is Bad

This one is surprisingly easy to refute. It says only scientifically verifiable claims are true. Actually let’s really throw this into relief:

Claim: Only scientifically verifiable claims are true.

If you’re particularly astute you just asked yourself a question: ‘if this is a claim, and the claim says that only scientifically verifiable claims are true, what about this claim?’

This question reveals the problem with the position: it’s self-undermining. After all, how would you scientifically verify this claim? Give it to the chemist, or the biologist, or the physicist, or the geologist, and say, ‘Please perform an experiment to verify this claim.’ What could they possibly do? Write it on a piece of paper and measure how much weight he paper has gained? Attach it to a seismic reader? Put some cells on it? There’s just nothing for them to do, of course, and that’s just because the claim is not itself scientifically verifiable. So anyone who believes the claim would, if they are to be consistent, have to stop believing it. And for those who never believed it in the first place, they're fine. So whatever you do, don’t believe the Claim. It’s false.

Why Reason #3 is Bad

Okay, almost there.

Finally, you might think that for ethics not to be fuzzy there have to be ethical facts, and for there to be ethical facts there will have to be an authority figure to say what’s right and wrong. 

But again, this is to ignore some basic ways we think about facts. No one says that if there are going to be facts about the shape of the earth, or the evolutionary history of humans, or the chemical composition of water, then there must be an authority figure who makes these things facts. Instead, there are facts about these things and there are people (scientists, of course) who give us the evidence for the claims that earth is spherical, humans are the product of biological evolution, and water is composed of H2O. It’s the evidence, the arguments they offer us for those conclusions, that wins the day, and it’s certainly not the discover-ers of that evidence that make the earth spherical or water composed of H2O.

If there are moral or ethical facts then we should expect them to act the same way as other facts. There is no need for an authority figure to make them true. Instead, there are people (philosophers and theologians, for instance) that give evidence or arguments for the ethical claims they make. Think of how many arguments, counter-arguments, and counters to the counter arguments we see in discussions of the moral permissibility of abortion. None of these people say, “I think it’s wrong so it’s wrong.” If they did, we’d pay them no attention. When we’re at our best we pay attention to their arguments and investigate whether they’re sound, just as we do with scientific arguments. 

‘But’ it might be replied, ‘it’s different with ethics. Those are cases of scientifically verifiable claims.’

And here we are back to Reason #2, which we already found defective.

In sum

We’re told there are the techies and the fuzzies, the people that deal with truth and falsity and the people that deal with interpretation, subjectivity, feelings, emotions, etc., and that ethics belongs to the realm of the subjective, not the objective, not the realm of facts and truth. But once we start pushing for arguments for that view, we find at least three very common arguments that are straightforwardly bad arguments.

It’s important we get rid of these confusions. In ethics, including in areas related to artificial intelligence, we face very real ethical problems. Those problems, if not properly solved both ethically and technically, can lead to disastrous consequences. But if we give up on ethics as being something objective, as something we can reason about and give arguments for and reasonably change our minds about, then we give up ethical inquiry being a tool at our disposal to solve these real problems. We rely on the ethical whims, misunderstandings, and altruism of profit-driven companies.

On the other hand, if we see ethics as concerned with facts, as an area in which there are acceptable and unacceptable answers, we put ourselves in a position to get to the bottom of things; there’s something to be gotten to the bottom of.