March 5, 2023

My House, My Rules? The Limits of Subjectivity in Ethics

In this post, I want to discuss whether and to what extent moral judgments, rules, commitments, and the like can be said to be “subjective”. My claim is that, insofar as morality bears on action, and actions usually affects other persons, the claim that morality is subjective only makes sense within a very narrow range of cases, if any.

In his monograph Ruling Passions, Simon Blackburn defends an expressivist analysis of moral judgment. He argues that moral judgments are not the kind of utterances that can be true in a substantial sense of “true”, because when we make moral judgments, we do not describe a state of affairs, but rather voice our practical evaluative attitudes towards states of affairs. So, if two persons make two incompatible moral judgments about the same object, there is no genuine contradiction, because they simply have two different attitudes towards this object.

Blackburn illustrates his point with an analogy. If one person permits smoking in their house, and another one forbids smoking in their house, there is no contradiction because the two rules apply to different houses.1 In what follows, I am going to explain why I think that this analogy fails to support Blackburn’s claim and how this bears on his position more generally.

Imagine you are invited to a friend’s place for a party, and another guests starts to light a cigarette. You politely ask them to refrain from smoking indoors. The host shows up and says: “I know, you don’t tolerate smoking at your place, but I don’t mind.” And then the host proceeds to encourage the guest to light their smoke.

At this point, there are a couple of things you might say to back your request. You might point out the dangers of second-hand smoking. You could talk about your asthma. Or your pregnancy. Or any medical condition that makes it especially worrisome for you to be exposed to tobacco smoke. Or simply the fact that the smell makes you nauseous.

Why would these be (at least prima facie) valid reasons for the other person to refrain from smoking? I take it to be obvious that they are because the action of lighting a smoke in your presence affects you. It is because there are some consequences of the action which directly concern you, that what you think about it matters. The host has an evaluative attitude towards smoking in their home, which prompts them to endorse a corresponding rule. And they may have reasons for this rule. However, you have reasons for not smoking in your house which may extend past the perimeter of your own four walls. So, the host can not as easily override your objection by resorting to a “My House, My Rules” principle.

So far, so good. But how does this relate to the larger point Blackburn wants to illustrate with this analogy, namely that evaluative judgments express attitudes, so that there is no real contradiction between two incompatible judgments from different persons?

I think there is, if not a contradiction, at least the potential for conflict, if we grant that not only the acting person has something to say about the moral status of an action but also the person(s) affected by said action.

Within the expressivist framework, rules of the form “actions of this type are good” a re to be interpreted as “I approve of these type of actions”, while this has no bearing on the stance others might take towards this action. However, once it comes to acting, the attitudes of others do matter. And this is where the expressivist story comes to a grinding halt. Because if two agents endorse two incompatible rules and both have an equal claim to their evaluative attitude being counted in a situation, a meta-rule is required in order to decide between two incompatible courses of action. But from an expressivist standpoint, these meta-rules are themselves just expressions of evaluative attitudes that cannot lay any claim to intersubjective validity. So if the host in Blackburn’s example backs their permission to smoke by resort to a “my house, my rules”-meta-rule, and you back your request to refrain from smoking by resort to a “health is top priority”-meta-rule, there is ex hypothesi no way to decide between those two. And even if you were to agree with the “my house, my rules”-meta-rule, this would only be a lucky coincidence and not a genuine case of agreement.

So, if we accept the idea that, insofar as others are concerned, what they think about our actions matters, the limits of subjectivity in morality and thus of the expressivist story become apparent. The claim that morality is subjective, in the sense that agents express their evaluative attitudes which do not belong into the class of statements which can be truth-apt, is incoherent once we take into account the essential practical dimension of moral judgments.