Is Morality Subjective or Objective? – Part 2

Subjectivists about morality say that all of our moral judgments are about nothing more than our personal preferences. Objectivists, on the other hand, claim that our moral valuations are based on a human-independent realm of moral facts. Is there a way to reconcile these two opposing views? In this second part of a two-part series, Leslie Allan explains the expressive function of moral language that gives it its subjective character. He’ll then return to filling out the case that ethics is also importantly ‘objective’ by looking at how ‘objective’ is formally defined and how it is used in legal reasoning. Leslie goes on to illustrate how the requirement for impartiality appears centrally in the five most prominent theories of ethics and in the long history of religious thinking on the subject.