How to ground ethics is a perennial problem. It is not made any easier by the fact that many people don’t see it as a problem at all.

The Fiction of a Thinkable World by Michael Steinberg

We all understand the difference between facts and opinions. The former are true regardless of who makes them, while the latter are only necessarily true for their holders. So “The bottle held 3/4 liters” is a fact, but “The wine inside was delicious” is not. We can establish the bottle’s volume empirically, because a physical attribute–so long as it isn’t altered–is always experienced consistently. The observer is not relevant to the evaluation. Deliciousness, however, is not a physical attribute. It’s contingent on physical attributes such as sugar, fat, and salt content, but the experience of taste varies greatly between individuals. Even one’s own experience of it can swing dramatically from one moment to the next.

Suppose I tell you, “My house is spooky.” The sentence’s arrangement indicates that it’s describing a house, and that’s essentially how we interpret it. After reading it, however, would you really know anything about the house? No, all you learned for certain is how I feel about my house. You could make some guesses about what it looks like, or what state of disrepair it’s in, but that information isn’t present in my statement; you’d have to infer it from prior knowledge about me and what I’m afraid of.

Few would argue this point. I couldn’t take anyone seriously who maintained that spookiness is an intrinsic quality of a building, that there is something objectively spooky about it. Who would listen to them? That’s the sort of opinion-identification that we’re good at. There are no philosophical movements devoted to proving the inherent spookiness of old houses; no religious leaders or political pundits preaching the universal truth of scary old mansions. If there were, we would immediately recognize that their positions were nonsense. We wouldn’t bother debating with them, because there’s no way to establish a legitimate argument, no empirical evidence which could be presented for or against it. Opinions–no matter how many people share them, no matter how strongly they’re felt–are still just opinions.

For some reason, however, most people don’t make this distinction when it comes to moral opinions. For example, they maintain that stealing really is unethical, that charity really is good, and so on. These statements are exactly as subjective as those above, though. There can be no physical evidence for morality, no empirical argument for or against it. Like spookiness, morality is a purely metaphysical concept. One can’t illustrate the ethics of an action by pointing to a material attribute, some tangible aspect of the world. Beyond how we personally feel, there’s simply nothing there.

The most common argument against this is that, if moral statements are just opinions, then they must not truly matter. If they’re merely subjective feelings, they can have no more significance than whether you prefer chocolate to vanilla, or Red Sox to Yankees. The thinking here, I suppose, is that since moral beliefs clearly do matter a great deal to us, they must have more weight than simple opinions. There must be some principal we can invoke, some logical somersault that can be performed, which will allow us to establish moral beliefs as objective reality, rather than subjective thought.

This sort of thinking confuses the issue a bit, though. Whether they represent objective facts or not, our moral beliefs do matter to us–often a great deal. It’s when we equate them to beliefs which aren’t that pressing, like our preference for chocolate or vanilla, that opinions looks meager; but even simple preferences still matter. It’s not as if people don’t care at all whether they have chocolate or vanilla, and many have far too much invested in whether the Red Sox or the Yankees win. It’s these things–things we care about–that matter. Some may not matter much to us, and some may not matter at all to others, but those are differences of degree, not of substance.

No elaborate logic or philosophical contortion is required to make sense of our moral intuitions. They’re not objective. They’re not absolute. They matter to us a great deal, though, so we treat them with more reverance than they deserve. When we find people engaging in behavior we don’t approve of, we’re inclined to say that such behavior is unethical, immoral, bad, even evil. But this is just another spooky house; we’re not describing the behavior of others when we call it “wrong”, we’re describing our own feelings about it. Why don’t we just say what’s really going on, though? “Same-sex marriage is wrong,” becomes, “I disapprove of and discourage same-sex marriage.” And “Charity is virtuous,” becomes, “I approve of and encourage charity.”

Obviously the former statements provide a lot more authority than my revised editions. That false authority comes from trying to say how things are, rather than more accurately expressing how we feel about them. It acts as an emotional sledgehammer in our social interactions. And my experience has been that few people are willing to lay down these sorts of normative, ethical statements, as misleading as they are, even when the linguistic, emotional trick is pointed out to them.

For myself, however, it’s been quite awhile since I consciously gave up this sort of statement, in favor of their more honest alternatives. I no longer label behavior as unethical or immoral. I no longer say what someone should do, what they ought to do, or what they are obligated to do. Whenever these moral vocabulary words show up in conversation, there is almost certainly a linguistic sleight-of-hand going on. It was never really about what other people ought to do, as much as it was about what I strongly would have preferred they do. It wasn’t about their obligations; it was about my expectations. It’s now been two years since I left those emotional tricks behind, and I don’t miss them at all.