Please don't say 'ethics is subjective'

One of my Masters students ¹ pointed me to this excellent blog by Stephanie Marsh. Now I agree 100% with the point - in fact the Venn diagram of the relations between the legally, socially and ethically permissible has been the backbone of my teaching ethics to AI engineers and data scientists for a while now. But I want to take issue with a choice of words:

Marketing tactics can walk a fine line between persuasion and manipulation, and this is an area where subjective ethics come into play. For example, tactics can exploit harmful addictions by eliciting emotional responses.
And, just because something is GDPR-compliant doesn’t mean it’s ethical. Industries and businesses operate within regulations to enforce ethical standards, but the subjective nature of ethics means that even perfectly legal business practices can be scrutinised as unethical behaviour.

Now, to be territorial for a second, 'subjective' is a term of art in Philosophy, the academic discipline which is home to Ethics. And in that discipline, we would mark down an A-level student, let alone an undergraduate, for writing 'subjective ethics' or 'the subjective nature of ethics' without a substantial explanation and justification. Like many terms of art in academic disciplines, such as 'user experience' or 'algorithm', it also has a vernacular usage. But that just means that we have to be extremely careful when writing outside the discipline to avoid unwanted connotations.

So, what does 'subjective' mean? One meaning of this term within Philosophy is just 'about the subject', i.e. about things with minds, which are subjects of thoughts and experiences, as opposed to the things in the world which are objects of those experiences. Of course, subjects in this sense can also be objects: the science of psychology studies subjects, so is 100% subjective in that sense, but it studies them as objects in the world. In contrast, the discipline of phenomenology studies subjects as subjects, it studies what is sometimes called 'lived experience'. And the two can inform each other because they have the same subject-matter, just different approaches. In this sense, ethics is definitely subjective, but so is UX and - for that matter - a fair amount of law.

Another meaning within Philosophy is in metaphysics, when we are considering, of a class of statements we take to be true or false, what kind of thing makes them true or false. In metaphysics, subjectivism about a discourse is the view that what makes a statement in that discourse true or false is something about the person who makes the statement. Subjectivism is true for food preferences: what makes it true that strawberry ice-cream is lovely but pistachio ice-cream is a disgusting abomination is something about me. Ice-cream is not subjective, but my evaluations of ice-cream flavours are subjective.

This example is, in many ways, misleading because it suggests that subjectivism entails 'anything goes'. But that is not true: we might be subjectivists about e.g. aesthetic value while also thinking that aesthetic judgement must be suitably sensitive to facts about the objects judged - what the painting looks like - and to norms within the community - it's place within various artistic traditions. Not all aesthetic judgement is equally good, which is why we have the concept of expert art critics (without thinking they are infallible, of course).

Academic judgement is subjective like this as well. Even in pure mathematics we can distinguish the objective judgement of whether a proof is valid from the subjective judgement that it is a good or [insert favourite evaluative term here] proof, without thinking that all opinions about the latter are of equal merit. In fact, the whole system of examiners and moderators and peer reviewers in STEMM as much as Arts & Humanities is founded on the idea that some 'subjective' academic judgements are better or worse than others.

Subjectivism, then, is a position in meta-ethics, not ethics. Thus a utilitarian, who things that what makes an act right or wrong is whether it maximises happiness, may be a subjectivist, if they think that judgements about other people's happiness are made true or false by facts about the person or community making the judgement, or an objectivist if they think their truth or falsity is independent of the people making the judgement. Similarly for other moral theories: they can be meta-ethically subjectivist or objectivist.

However, in the vernacular usage, 'subjective' does have the implication of 'anything goes', of de gustibus non disputandum est, that one person's opinion is as good as any other person's opinion, which would have consequences for moral theory. It is better to call this 'nihilism' or 'amoralism' than 'subjectivsm.'

It is pretty clear from the context - and please do read the blog - that Stephanie Marsh is not intending to invoke this vernacular meaning, but nor are they invoking either of the more technical Philosophical uses, which are irrelevant to the point being made. So what are they intending to say? (What is the speaker-meaning here?)

It seems that the idea is to contrast ethics to law (which may turn out to have subjective elements in one or more of the Philosophical senses). Which raises the question:

what does the law have in common with (vernacular) paradigms of objectivity like the sciences, which ethics lacks?

The answer turns out to be: due process. In the law, and also in most sciences, there is a procedure you can follow which will give you an answer to the question under consideration. The procedure aims for a unique answer but doesn't always achieve that. Nor is it indefeasible - new applications of the procedure with further evidence might produce a different answer. But the procedure grants epistemic authority: if the procedure has been followed correctly, then the answer produced has authority. Others are obliged to accept it (until a new application of the procedure with new evidence produces a different answer).

Ethics is not at all like this! Or to be precise: being ethical is not like this. There is no procedure you can follow which will give you an epistemically authoritative ethical decision. Being ethical is:

making up your own mind about what to do in a complex, messy, and irremediably human situation and taking responsibility for that decision.

There are, of course, processes which can help you do that. You might consider the golden rule, or the categorical imperative, or the hedonic calculus, or what some model of virtue might do, but any moral theory which says that there is an authoritative application of such considerations to determine a correct answer in a given context is selling snake oil.²

Ethics is not - in any useful sense - subjective, but being ethical is something each individual has to do for themselves. When you want to contrast ethics with science or law, don't mislead by saying it is subjective. Rather say that being ethical is something each of us has to try to do for ourselves; that there are no ethical authorities we can appeal to to avoid that, there is no deferring of responsibility to a process or procedure; that someone else's virtue, or wisdom, or expertise, does not give them epistemic authority over other people's ethical choices.