ABSTRACT
This chapter considers several arguments for thinking that subjectivism is true and suggests that none of them is convincing. Ethical subjectivism claims that the first of these statements is not true. According to subjectivism, it isn’t true that murder is always wrong. Hume claimed that an ethical statement can’t be validly deduced from a premises that describes only what is the case. It is pretty clear that astronomy and anthropology describe different sorts of facts. Astronomers are interested in planets, stars, and other celestial objects. Anthropologists, on the other hand, study similarities and differences among human cultures. In his book Principia Ethica, G. E. Moore criticized the idea that the ethical properties of an action, for example, its rightness or wrongness, might be identical with some “natural” property of that action. Moore correctly claimed that ethical expressions are not synonymous with naturalistic expressions. Moore, however, went on to claim that ethical properties are not identical with naturalistic properties.
