This was a topic that was suggested, and one that I think is very important. I’m going to come out and say that I believe truth and morality are subjective. But I’m not married to that view. I could be wrong. That’s what I will be working through in this series.
This series will be more of a journey into the ideas that surround morality and truth, and I’m hoping to not only dive into the relevant work of various philosophers, but also work through this with others. Through all of this, my views may and probably will change, and I hope others are also open to that if they choose to take this journey as well.
If you’ve watched The Good Place, I’m hoping not to come out of this as Chidi does in the show, which is knowledgeable on the subject, but incapable of putting that knowledge into action. But he is a character that I think will appear in this series from time to time, because that may be interesting.
In this post though, I just want to lay some groundwork, and explain the view I’m starting off with. Beginning with truth, there needs to be a distinction between what is true and what is a fact. This is often a difficult thing to get across. For many, the two terms have become interchangeable, when there are more nuances.
Part of the issue is the manner in which many people think about establishing facts. There isn’t a single way to go about it. Showing something is historically factual is much different from showing something is scientifically factual. If you’d apply the same scientific method you do to physics as you do to history, you’d find that nearly nothing is historical.
History is based more on probability. You can’t go back and retest history in a lab. Historians address their subject in a very different way from someone in the hard sciences. Both are different from the sort of facts and truth that one seeks in a court case. Hearsay is a whole lot more accepted in history than it is in a court of law. There are different standards.
Those different standards and methods of getting to facts have to be acknowledged, and that’s where we can get into the subjective nature of truth. The best example I can think of this is the world of mythology. To apply the historical method, or scientific method to a mythological story doesn’t make sense. Such a story is neither trying to portray a historical fact nor a scientific fact, so using either method is bringing the wrong sort of tools to the field.
Myths deal with a different sort of truth. The story isn’t factually accurate, and it is never meant to be. But instead, it portrays a philosophical or theological truth. One of my favorite examples of this comes from Zhuangzi, who was a Chinese philosopher who wrote one of the foundational texts of Taoism.
Zhuangzi relates a story of the dexterous butchers. The butcher’s name was Ting, and in the story, he is cutting up an ox for Lord Wen-hui. As he does this, Ting is dancing through the motions, and his knife is moving as if it is just touching air. When he comes to a difficult part, he moves slowly and with great subtlety until the job is completed.
Ting relates that a good cook only needs to change his knife once a year, as he cuts. A mediocre cook has to change once a month, because he hacks. For Ting, he’s had the same knife for nineteen years, because he understands that there are spaces between the joints, and a knife has really no thickness. And because of that, a knife has a lot of room to play about.
This story isn’t really about a chef though. It’s not about giving practical tips to butchers. Zhuangzi is trying to relate a truth about the way of the Tao. That in life we should look at the empty spaces and move through them as the spirit guides us. For Zhuangzi, the story is true. If you adopt that sort of philosophy, then one can see the truth in such a statement. One can argue against such a view, and other philosophers have done just that because they see a different set of philosophical truths. Neither can be factually proven, but there is no need for that. Which is why I conclude that truth must be subjective.
Morality is a bit different. But I think it should be clear that it is subjective. Looking at history, we can trace how morality changes. We don’t have the same set of moral values that people did 100 years ago, much less 1,000 years ago. There are similarities, but we also advance. But it’s not just one path that people have taken.
If we were to take a survey of the general public about what is moral and what isn’t, we’d get some similarities. Primarily, these are gut reactions that people have on the same topic. But as we expand that, we begin seeing vast differences. Almost everyone finds murder to be immoral. But if we push that, we can find exceptions; cases where murder is acceptable, at least for some people. War is a big one. Whether war in general is moral is a topic that scholars have spent centuries debating. But murdering someone during a war, is that moral?
My word choice is probably going to impact one’s answer there, because the idea of murder gives us such a negative gut reaction that we know it has to be wrong. But if we change that to killing someone during war, or if we change the question to, are casualties during a war moral? The two questions are basically the same, but one gives a more gut reaction than the other.
So I believe that morality is subjective. That does not mean that I think anything can be moral. There are arguments that are very valid when it comes to debating whether or not certain actions are immoral or not. But there are still debates.
I tried to keep this relatively brief, but I wanted to put a foundation down on this series that explains where I’m coming from, and explains that this will be a journey.