My views on objective morality

[Jenny A]

For my two cents, our moral faculties exist in our subconscious and are not amenable to change by consciousness. Our moral judgements come to us from the depths of our being. Since we don't have access to the formation of our moral judgements, they appear to us as fixed and objective. They are semi-fixed, being the product of culture, genes, and development, as well as our current experiences. So moral judgements are not subjective like tastes in ice cream; they are more durable than that.

My initial reaction to this was to nod and say true, true. But after thinking it over, I'm not so sure. My taste in ice cream isn't of any real import, but although it changes over time, I don't think I made a conscious decision to prefer coffee to my previous favorite chocolate chip vanilla. And I don't think I could have made a conscious choice to change my preference, though I could certainly have chosen to eat coffee instead of vanilla chocolate chip for for some reason other than taste. And if I did, I might have grown to prefer it.

But I think I not only can, but have made changes in my moral judgments based on conscious reasoning or conscious learning. Some examples include coming to the conclusion that there is nothing morally wrong with being homosexual, a conscious change made thirty years ago, based upon reason over gut feeling. The reasoned change now feels like a gut instinct. More subtle, are the gut feelings I have about legal ethical issues such as exparte communications, since I learned that particular set of morals in my twenties in the classroom. At the time some of them felt intuitively wrong. But these too now feel like a gut instinct. Finally, when I look at past moral structures now inimical to our current one, I can immerse myself in that world view and read without gut level moral disgust, about events that would disgust me if they were contemporary events.

I don't think I'm unique in this.