Objective morality: Do not harm others except in defense or commensurate retaliation. Everyone should be held to this standard.
Subjective morality: One’s personal beliefs; for example, one is obligated to be charitable, homosexual intercourse is a horrible sin, etc. These are based on subjective value judgments or prior indoctrination (I don’t agree with either of the examples, btw) and thus one should hold oneself and maybe the people one closely associates with to this standard.
Thoughts?
Are you asking us to critique your definitions? Are you writing a dictionary of ethics and hoping for editorial comment? Is there, in fact, a debate hidden in your OP somewhere?
The interpretation of that description of objective morality is subjective.
It’s true that people tend to believe in either objective or relative morality, but I don’t know how the examples you gave relate to that. Objective and relative morality aren’t in themselves moral stances…they’re frameworks. So, you could believe “Do not harm others except in defense or commensurate retaliation, one is obligated to be charitable, and homosexual intercourse is a horrible sin” and believe that all three of those moral beliefs are objective truth. Alternately, you can believe in all three of those beliefs and at the same thime hold that their truth is relative.
Paladud, the belief that commensurate retaliation is moral is highly subjective. For example, Christians are taught not to retaliate at all.
What does “objective morality” mean? Shouldn’t something “objective” have to be quantified scientifically? Shouldn’t you be able to “test” for morality somehow, with criteria everyone can agree on? Shouldn’t it be completely independent of people’s opinions?
Since none of these is the case, I don’t believe there can be such a thing as “objective morality”. The best we can do is to hold up certain precepts on which most people agree, and enforce them as if they were self-evident principles of objective morality.
I don’t think this absence of objectivity is necessarily a bad thing though. It’s just how we live in this world. I’ll advocate for my version of morality while you advocate for yours, and eventually we’ll find that more people agree with me than with you, or vice-versa.* In the meantime, hopefully we minimize the wars and strife caused by our disagreement, although some is probably inevitable. So be it.
*not too likely since I’m right and you’re wrong.
Awful choice of words on my part. It should have read something like “universal standards of morality” and “private standards of morality,” with a hefty gray area in between.
You forgot relative morality, which I guess is OK since it isn’t so popular most of the time (like any other kind of morality, it can be summoned into existence temporarily). But it is still there.