Simple Subjectivism

Standard subjectivist metaethical views (represented in our chart by the box in the lower left-hand corner) define the content of moral judgments so that moral properties are about the subjective responses of moral appraisers and moral agents. Relevant subjective responses include desire and affective attitudes of many kinds. The specific sorts will depend on the particular subjectivist theory. Subjectivism gets much of its impetus from the thought that there is something especially practical about morality. This is the same idea that the internalists of Chapter 4 are trying to capture. So it is no wonder that subjectivists are internalists. The simplest versions of subjectivism try to explain the practicality of morality by postulating an especially tight connection between the contents of moral judgments and the motives one might have for acting in accord with the judgment. In particular, the simplest subjectivisms make the contents of those judgments be about the very motives on which agents act when they do what is right or eschew what is wrong. One individualistic variant holds that the property of being right just is the property of being desired or approved of by the speaker or appraiser. Another adopts a similar view but says that the relevant motives must belong to the agent whose actions are being judged, not the speaker of the utterance. To enable discussion, let's call views like the first variant appraiser subjectivism and those like the second agent subjectivism . (Appraiser subjectivism can also be called “speaker subjectivism,” but since people can silently make moral judgments, we'll try to stick with the former.) The individualistic versions of each sort can be broadened by widening the group whose motivating attitudes are relevant. These versions will relativize their judgments to the motivating commitments of the speaker's or agent's social group or society, to generate variants we will call appraiser group subjectivism and agent group subjectivism . Since most of these views wind up relativist (in senses to be explained later), the very same views sometimes get called “speaker relativism,” “speaker group relativism,” “agent relativism,” “agent group relativism,” and so on in the literature. These views count as minimally realist insofar as they hold that the predicate ‘morally right,’ for example: Stands for a property, the property of being desired or approved of by the speaker (or agent or speaker's group). The sentence ‘ X is morally right’ represents X as having the property of being approved of by the speaker (or agent, or speaker or agent's group). The content of ‘ X is right’ is that X is approved of by the speaker (or agent, or speaker or agent's group). An assertion of ‘ X is right’ expresses the belief that X is approved of by the speaker (or agent, or speaker or agent's group). The belief that X is right represents things to be just the way the sentence ‘ X is right’ represents them to be; they both represent X as being approved of by the speaker (or agent, or speaker or agent's group). The belief that X is right and the sentence ‘ X is right’ are true when X in fact is approved of by the speaker (or agent, or speaker or agent's group). At least some indicative sentences of the form ‘ X is right’ do in fact represent the world correctly, and these sentences turn out to be true in virtue of correctly representing them as being desired by the speaker (or agent, or speaker or agent's group).