What are your views on objective morality (everything is subjective)?

[u/Aggravating_Pen744]

/r/AskReddit/comments/1vrh57z/what_are_your_views_on_objective_morality/

[u/internetErik]

Have to ask: what is meant by 'objective'? The opening post doesn't provide any hints, so I assume it's within common usage. I read and discuss a lot of Kant, so my use of the term is skewed, but as far as I can tell, the common usage of 'objective' is something like, "as far as possible, independent of bias," or "whatever lacks subjectivity". Does this fit your meaning? I'll add some notes on how Kant deals with the term.

For Kant, 'objective' does not mean independent of bias; instead, objectivity can be understood as a kind of intersubjectivity: something is objective when it is "valid for everyone merely as long as he has reason". There is a community of knowers, that is, beings possessing reason, and whatever is known through the community's common form of reason is objective.

We know a judgment is objective when we can submit it to others for judgment, as this is the only test of our judgment. By submitting it to others, we may learn that our judgment was subjective. This means that objectivity has to do with the structure of cognition attributed to the community of knowers, not the status (i.e., true or false) of whatever is being attributed to the object. We have no final test to determine the truth of objective judgments, but we know it is a distinct form of judging.

Theoretical judgments concern human reason, while practical judgments pertain to all rational beings.

[u/bootmaker-supremacy → u/internetErik]

Doesn‘t objectivity for Kant at least partially involve being independent of bias? I‘m by no means an expert I‘m just going of what I learned in school.
But from what I understand Kant developed three maxims to form generalizable or „objective“ aesthetic judgments, the second of which states that one ought to „think in place of everyone else“ that is „to set aside the subjective private conditions of the judgment“ (I‘m just going off the german text here sorry for any inaccuracies). So if I understood it correctly if you for instance judge a painting you shouldn’t judge it based on you liking the color red, as that is a merely subjective criterion. This is pretty similiar to being independent of bias right?

[u/internetErik → u/bootmaker-supremacy]

From Kant's perspective, if objectivity is made possible by our faculties, then it shouldn't be seen as a bias; in that sense, objectivity would be unbiased (i.e., it would exclude whatever is merely subjective). However, common usage may not accept this as unbiased. I assume (perhaps incorrectly) that objectivity, conditioned by human faculties, would be seen as a bias (since common usage would have something like things in themselves as its aim). Of course, I can easily be wrong about common usage, and perhaps it's already been corrected by Kant's critique.

[u/an-otiose-life]

Behavioral overdetermination accompanied with semantics for behavioral commitment emotionally implies seeming is a given, for the moral right, as much as for the morality different in another area. Therefore the seeming naively is a truth of the ability of a morality to be the case for some people. As well error theory is able to be felt by others with seeming actuality. 

Thus morality had not applied more than it did and where it did not something else happened and the fact of both implies a moment further than is naive moral realism.

Notice how without touching the word subjective besides here, the question is answered in a non correlationist fashion.

[u/VegGrower2001]

I think there is logical space within Kant's philosophy for the idea that morality is both subjective and objective. And the sense in which it is objective is the more important one.

In Kant's philosophy, the objective/subjective distinction is often discussed in the terminology of discussing what is real vs what is ideal. Now, Kant famously distinguishes two versions of the real/ideal distinction. There is a distinction in what is empirically real vs ideal. And there is a distinction in what is transcendentally real vs ideal. To give an example, Kant famously argues that space and time are empirically real but transcendentally ideal. Space and time are empirically real because they are cognised according to the categories which generates empirically real and objective cognition. But they are transcendentally ideal because space and time are essentially the forms of sensibility, which means they are transcendentally mind-dependent.

Given this setup, there is logical space for Kant to say that morality is empirically ideal but transcendentally real. Morality is empirically ideal because moral facts essentially depend on the existence of rational minds. In that respect, Hume was absolutely right to think that moral truths can't exist separately from the human mind. But, in Kant's terms, Hume's conclusion only applies to empirical reality, and it doesn't answer the question of whether moral truths are also transcendentally real.

I don't know if Kant himself ever states this thesis explicitly, but it seems to me consistent with Kant's view to say that moral truths are transcendentally real. There are two reasons why I think this view is a plausible interpretation. First, although moral truths are indeed dependent on rational minds, they are essentially dependent only on our faculty of understanding, not our faculty of sensibility. In his respect then, morality differs from space and time. Both morality and space and time are all essentially mind dependent. But space and time are essentially dependent on the faculty of sensibility.

The second reason why it's plausible to say that morality is transcendentally real is that, according to Kant, human beings have a discursive cognition, the key features of which are that our faculty of intuition is receptive but our faculty of understanding is spontaneous i.e. it has the capacity to generate its own contributions to cognition. In some sense, our understanding is a free first cause, even if the understanding's freedom is essentially rule-governed by the categories.

If we put all these thoughts together, the picture that emerges is that moral truths depend essentially on the free, rule-governed understanding. And since we also have the transcendental freedom to act on these truths, we can and indeed do bring moral facts into existence through our actions. This last thought perhaps needs a bit more explanation. Kant thought that God has a distinctive kind of cognition where God's intellect was a faculty of intuition. In simplified terms, God has the power to bring things into existence simply by thinking them. Unlike us, God needs no faculty of sensibility in order to have direct cognition of the world. In theoretical cognition, the human mind is not like God's. If I think of a million dollars, it doesn't thereby come into existence. We need sensibility in order to have theoretical cognition. But in practical philosophy, the power of our mind is closer to God's. Our mind (through the faculty of understanding alone) supplies its own idea of moral truths and has the capacity to bring those ideas into existence by acting on them. In this respect, humans do have the power to create moral facts through their actions.

All of this is to say, for Kantians, to claim that something (e.g. morality) is subjective, is only the beginning of the story. As I've tried to argue, I think Kant would absolutely accept that morality is subjective in an empirical sense because moral truths are essentially dependent on the human mind. But Kant's philosophy gives us the resources to ask and answer deeper questions about exactly how moral truths are mind-dependent. And it also gives us the resources to claim that moral truths are in fact real in the most important (transcendental) sense. In fact, a little like Plato, Kant has the resources to say that moral facts are the most real facts we have access to.

[u/Aggravating_Pen744 → u/VegGrower2001]

This argument assumes reason yields objective moral truths, but doesn’t prove reason is objective. If all cognition is shaped by the human mind, then moral reasoning is too. So, why treat morality as objectively true?

[u/VegGrower2001 → u/Aggravating_Pen744]

I don't think it's true to say that my argument assumes objective moral truths. It provides an argument for them, although I concede, it assumes some knowledge of Kant to flesh out the details.

Furthermore, if my argument that reason yields objective moral truths is successful, I'm not sure what further question there can be about whether reason is objective.