Are there any synonyms that could further describe good or bad? Could you explain what it means to do good or bad to someone who has never experienced it?
In his argument of subjective morality, Oxford’s Alex O’Connor poses this line of questioning. What it further implies is that what we gauge our morality on is not a matter of truth or fact. The definitions of good and bad are tied to a feeling that cannot be described through synonyms or shared experiences. If morality is believed to be objective, based on fact, then there must be facts behind it that are not based on human opinion or consensus. In this essay, my claim is that morality is largely subjective, influenced by personal inclination, thereby challenging objective morality and disclaiming the theory that divine command and religious objectivity are the sole proprietors of ethics.
According to Ayn Rand’s essay, “The Objectivist Ethics,” morality is the code of values that guides man’s choices and actions. In the hook of this essay, I referenced Alex O’Connor, who inquires if there are synonyms to the words good and bad. He further explains that there are no specific or descriptive synonyms for those words because they would have to be compliant with a moral philosophy, such as religion. Religion holds that God determines what is good and bad. Because believers accept God’s existence as fact, divine commands are treated as objective. Yet this objectivity applies only to those who recognize God’s authority; outside of that belief, commands are neither true nor false. This demonstrates a critical weakness in religious objectivity and divine command theory, which is only considered morally binding for believers, and objectivity cannot be factual if it is limited by the boundaries of communal belief.
Additionally, individuals adopt religious ethics because they feel personally aligned with them. This describes faith. What should be established, however, is that faith itself is subjective. Faith can be understood as a strong form of trust grounded in belief, specifically, belief in a religious text or divine authority. In Miriam Schleifer McCormick’s book, Belief as Emotion, she develops this idea by arguing that belief intersects with emotion, suggesting that believing in something isn’t just thinking it’s true. It involves feeling a sense of accuracy that’s not solely based on good judgment. This further demonstrates that faith is inherently subjective, as are the beliefs grounded in it. This subjectivity explains the persistence of the “one true religion” fallacy: people of different religions each hold a personal conviction that their own belief system is superior, often experiencing that conviction as objective truth despite its reliance on subjective faith.
I return to The Objectivist Ethics once more because Ayn Rand makes an argument for objective morality independent of religious belief. She argues that morality is objective due to the factual requirements of human life. A fact of human life is that life is the standard of value. “An organism’s life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is good, that which threatens it is evil.” By this logic, moral agents make their decisions based on what they ought to do on a pleasure-to-pain scale. Ayn argues that man is conscious but not born with the innate knowledge of what is true or false, nor what is good or evil. Because knowledge must be acquired through reason, humans require ethics to guide their choices and actions toward survival. Rand maintains that reason is the primary means for cognition, not faith nor instinct. From the factual nature of human existence, that man must act to sustain his life, Rand describes this as the virtue of rationality. On this basis, Rand concludes that morality is objective: it is grounded in the facts of reality and the requirements of human survival, rather than in subjective belief or divine command.
This argument, however, does not consider psychopaths who meet Rand’s criteria for moral agency (living, rational beings) but have a profound disregard for social and moral norms. Psychopaths violate moral codes, but if these codes were in fact objective and grounded in life as the standard of value, one might expect psychopaths to recognize life not only as valuable to themselves but as a value worthy of respect in others. The existence of psychopaths who meet the criteria for moral agents yet systematically disregard moral constraints demonstrates a weakness in Rand’s argument: the theory does not adequately account for how objective moral truths can reliably function as moral motivation across all agents.
Conclusively, religious objectivity and Divine Command Theory do not hold as objective truths because they are dependent on communal beliefs, which are not universal facts. Similarly, Ayn Rand’s framework, which posits that life is the standard of value, does not consistently motivate all moral agents. These limitations suggest that neither faith nor the virtue of reason can fully account for a universally binding morality. There may be principles guiding ethical behavior beyond individual or subjective alignment, but their basis is unlikely to reside in commonly invoked sources of moral authority.
Delivered by Foutoumata Traore
