July 2, 2012              Brian Lewis, Ballarat, Australia

ARE JUDGMENTS OF MORALITY MERELY SUBJECTIVE?

The question of the objectivity of judgments of morality gets many answers. The problem can perhaps be illustrated by examining an incident for the World War II film The Cruel Sea. A British destroyer captain is stalking a German submarine. He is faced with the decision whether to drop another depth charge on the spot in the sea where he thinks his quarry may be hiding directly underneath several hundred torpedoed British sailors who are waiting to be picked up. Caught in the anguishing dilemma of knocking out the submarine even if it means killing the survivors of the abandoned ship, he mutters to the first mate that 'one must do what one must do and say one's prayers'.  

Confronted with such a dilemma, some would say that the captain should not torment himself but do what he thinks to be right in the situation. Moral truth is relative to the person acting, the subject. There are no morally right or wrong decisions in any objective sense and no right- or wrong- making characteristics of actions as such. In other words, there are no objective moral truths at all, apart from the one moral truth, namely, that the individual should do what he or she is comfortable with. Other considerations such as accepted moral standards and rules or the effect of one's actions on others are irrelevant. Everyone should 'do their own thing'.  

Many today possess no basic philosophical system and find difficulty in understanding philosophical argumentation. As a result they tend to over-emphasise individual freedom as 'the power to do what I want' rather than the 'power to do what I ought', to put more emphasis on what they feel than on what they think, to rely too much on appearances rather than on principles, and to see everything as relative.  

In our permissive society this individualism is a very real temptation. But it is a very subjective and unreflective statement of position, typical of the morally immature. It fails to respond to the experience of evil in the world such as the physical and sexual abuse of children and can give no rational account of how people arrive at purely subjective decisions like this. Pope John Paul II took issue with such an individualistic ethic, 'wherein each individual is faced with his own truth, different from the truth of others' and went on to state that in this way human freedom is made an absolute and a 'radically subjectivist conception of moral judgment' is adopted.  

Another reaction to the captain's dilemma might be to condemn his action outright on the grounds that it is at odds with one of the most important moral rules of western society, namely, the obligation not to inflict harm, in this case death, particularly on one's family, colleagues or fellow citizens. This was the spontaneous reaction of most of the crew of the destroyer, who shouted their horror at what the captain did. This may have been a knee-jerk reaction, but perhaps the underlying reason may have been the conviction that one should not contravene the accepted standards of one's culture and society, in this case the obligation not to inflict injury on others. Such a conclusion accords with what is called social relativism, which holds that moral truth is relative, not to an individual, but to the specific group or culture to which the individual belongs. An act is morally right if it accords with the mores of a person's peer group or society, wrong if it does not. Morality in this view is synonymous with what is customary.  

Although there is no doubt, as anthropologists attest, that cross-cultural disagreements about moral practices exist, it does not follow from this description that morality is relative to one's group or society. There is no necessary connection between what people actually do and what they ought to do. Nor does it follow that in acting against the mores of one's group one is doing wrong. The crew of the destroyer could not think deeply enough to be able to grasp this, and so they simply condemned the captain as a 'bloody murderer'.  

If we reject both kinds of ethical relativism, the obvious conclusion is that judgments of moralty must have a certain objectivity if they are to have any sort of truth. They must harmonise with what actually is. If this were not the case we could not claim that any action either ought or ought not be done. The result of this would be that it would be impossible to enter into any discussion about differing moral opinions, because every moral judgment would simply be a matter of personal satisfaction or feeling, or just custom. And this would be the end of the matter.  

Another response to the captain's dilemma in the situation might be that any statements or rules of morality are so general or so abstract as to be irrelevant to practical decision making. The very important injunction against killing innocent persons would then have to be ignored or overlooked. On reflecting more deeply we surely cannot accept such a conclusion. The decision to drop the depth charge was clearly not taken in order to kill the survivors in the water, but to destroy the submarine thought to be lurking underneath them which posed a real threat to many more lives, both in the destroyer and on board Allied shipping in general. The captain's action can in this context be argued to be a justifiable act of self-defence in circumstances in which protecting life entailed taking life. If moral rules relating to the killing of human beings were irrelevant to this situation, there would have been no reason for the captain to agonise over the decision nor to talk about saying one's prayers.  

Judgments of morality then are neither irrelevant nor unimportant. In fact we commonly refer to obligatory moral statements such as 'Human life should be respected' or 'You must not take the property of another' or 'Treat others as you want them to treat you' as moral truths. They are true, not because some authority, human or divine, laid them down, but because the long experience of humanity has seen them to be valid in themselves. They encapsulate for us in varying degrees how human life in community should be lived. Recognising and accepting  these kinds of truths are vital both for ethics and for actual decision making.  

However, there is an even more important insight shown in the foregoing response to the captain's dilemma. It is that in the last analysis moral truth in the strict sense has properly to be found in concrete situations. The actual situation is the ultimate reality which has to be confronted and judged on its merits. It is necessarily richer than the reality that is envisaged and judged abstractly in judgments of moralty or rules, as it may involve dimensions of reality that are not yet or not sufficiently taken into account in such preformulated moral rules.  

Clearly, moral truth in this sense is not laid out for us in advance. It has to be sought and discovered by each individual person facing the complex reality of daily living, helped of course by the more general judgments of morality or moral rules. As Fuchs says, the insights contained in given moral truths and the individual searching for moral truth in a particular situation 'encounter one another'. So moral rules enlighten and inform the searcher after moral truth, who will normally be more or less conscious of them, but the quest is ultimately not just a question of the application of something already given. It is a search for, a discovery of moral truth, in the light of what is given in the actual situation with its attendant circumstances. We return here to what we have said about conscience.