ABSTRACT
The question of whether value judgements are objective is often seen as the central issue of moral philosophy, but it can easily be a source of confusion, since the objective/subjective dichotomy does not provide the most useful way of approaching the questions raised by ethics. One risk with these terms is that objectivity is identified with provability so that the issue becomes whether moral claims are provable with the implication that if they are not, they should be treated as subjective and as merely expressing what one individual happens to feel. A related risk is that the objective/subjective dichotomy encourages us to think that the key issue in ethics is whether moral claims are based in reality or merely reflect our reaction to it. Seeing the issue in these terms is misguided, for it fails to recognise the nature of the claim to correctness in ethics. The real issue is not whether moral claims reflect some strange, action-guiding feature of reality, but whether there are judgements on human action which everyone should accept (and act on) regardless of their own preferences or dispositions. Do we believe there are conclusions about how to act that anyone
who is capable of thinking about the world ought to draw? To put it another way, does the correct way of understanding the world involves recognising certain judgements of human action as correct or does it involve accepting that all such judgements simply reflect the reaction of the person who makes them? Contemporary philosophers have generally taken a rather different approach to this and have continued the objectivity debate, arguing over the merits and demerits of realist and anti-realist accounts of ethics. Both approaches, however, are flawed. Although the realist approach recognises that ethics involves a claim to correctness, it seeks to interpret that claim as relating to some actionguiding feature of reality. By contrast, anti-realism is clear that statements about reality cannot have logical implications for how we should act, but it takes this to imply that ethics is a matter of our reactions. This involves rejecting the claim to correctness; and, therefore, anti-realist accounts of ethics are in an important sense not accounts of ethics at all. The flawed starting point of both approaches is the assumption that ethics is either based on some feature of reality or a matter of our reactions. The realists are forced to embrace the first view because they recognise that accepting the second view would involve rejecting ethics, while the anti-realists embrace the second view because they realise that the first view makes no sense. Our account, however, involves rejecting this dichotomy. Ethics is defined by the substantive claim that moral judgements do not simply reflect the reactions of those who make them; however, this does not involve claiming that reality (or rationality) compels us to act in certain ways. The ethical claim is that there are judgements on human action which reflection ought to (but not must) lead every thinking individual to make, regardless of how she happens to be disposed.
