Metaethical subjective relativism

[bennyboy]

TBB, what you are saying describes almost all human experience, not just the experience of ethics.  Beauty, love, even the color and solidity of the desk in front of me, are not to be found anywhere but in the evaluations of a subjective agent.

Well, there's certainly a subjective component to everything we do, since that is, in a sense, what we are: subjective agents.

However, part of our subjective consciousness posits things outside our minds. We explain our subjective experience by talking about the existence of things outside our minds that have a causal or existential relation to our consciousness. So, for example, without the subjective feeling of being pulled towards the center of the Earth, we would have no theory of gravity, but our theory of gravity includes this thing, the Earth, which is outside our mind, and which pulls us toward it, irrespective of our subjective state. We have a subjective consciousness of something objective.

I argue that some consider our subjective feelings of ethics to be similar: our preferences refer to something as objective as the Earth, but that these theories are incorrect; while they do have a causal history do exist, there is nothing outside our minds for our preferences to coherently refer to in the same sense that there really is something outside our minds that our subjective ideas about material reality coherently refer to.

Okay, I get you.

Let me ask you a question.  As a mental agent, would one's DNA and the instinctive behaviors beyond the control of conscious awareness be considered part of the mechanism of the subjective agent, or part of the objective environment?  Since I have no control over those things, I would consider them objective to my subjective agency, even though other people seem them as part and parcel.

I'd therefore consider the love of a parent for a child as an objective (and mostly universal) human more, sufficient that those who don't experience it naturally will have it imposed as an inviolable ethic.  And I don't think that this is a product of conscious behavior, but more likely that whatever culture or world view one holds, it will wrap itself in some way around that natural impulse to protect.