Morality Is Subjective

What one understands as moral can be perceived as immoral from someone else. Although this is pretty straightforward, the vast majority of people believe that morality can be objective. Myriads of political conflicts and religious ideologies have yet to convince us about this simple reality.

Being part of a religion or adhering to a political ideology does not make something or someone “moral”. Morality is a set of agreed principles, confined within a group of people at a certain point in time. Beyond the premises of a certain group, morality is nothing more than a set of random accepted practises. Even within a group, members can disagree about morality depending on their unique placement in a given situation.
 

Religious books cannot and do not answer universal questions about morality since themselves are often contradictory. Gods might kill in one instance while salvage on another. Politicians leading countries or soldiers killing each other, follow much the same moral logic. Sometimes it is ok to kill for the “greater good” —as some people put it in order to excuse their actions. It seems that most of us shape our morality towards the end result, ignoring the means we use to reach it. This is the first truth about the subjective nature of morality: it is perceived sequential to an event, not as a whole.

Philosophy much like religion have tried to address issues of morality with a-priori (pre-existing) sets of truths. They have failed equally. There is no such thing as "pre-existing morality". Morality is something that is constructed and disassembled much like a sand dune

 

We can never delve completely into an objective moral critique when it comes to a event. We might get exposed to fact 1,4 and 5 while fact 2, 7 and 8 will be missing from our perspective. This is the simple reason why objective morality is impossible. Every single human perceives a set of events differently. Every single human judges and acts on something based on their own unique premises.
 

Our own physiology is diverse enough from one another so that our hormones and neurotransmitters can shape our morality differently from one another. Researchers even found that even a single cup of warm vs cold coffee can change entirely how one behaves. Imagine what an impact this can have in a political room with people with different diets. Imagine what impact on our morality our food has, the medication we take or the drugs (illicit or not) we do. Just our physiology alone makes morality vastly subjective.

In the grand scheme of things, the very fact that there are thousands of religions, political ideologies and judiciary systems across the world—ranging massively since the dawn of human history—demonstrates how subjective morality is. Nonetheless, it seems that in almost every religious or political debate people are going to bring their own set of morality without first asking if one accepts the premises of the opposite party.

People want to believe that morality, their own morality, can be objective so we can all get along. Quite the opposite is true. The fact we don't accept morality as subjective creates conflict around us.

A Democrat or a Republican might defend their country's action to war much like an anarchist living off the grid in Australia might decide its OK to kill someone that crosses their own private property. He might even kill because a certain individual looks like his abusive father or because he is mentally unstable. We cannot objectively judge people about their moral actions unless we know the entire trail of their own history—and it is rather impossible to know each and everyone’s moral history. Most of our memories are not even real. We cannot even totally know and understand our own self; how can we judge objectively the morality of others?

Take any individual, every criminal serving a sentence, every soldier and emperor that ever lived on this planet and they will present their case in a way that is morally justifiable. Even if we take the example of voluntaryism or anarchy we will still find people that perceive “initiation of violence” and "coercsion" vastly different from one another.
 

In our crypto world, an an-cap bitcoin exchange-whale might steal another person’s money through a "legal" scam, disabling one’s livelihood that might even bring death to their sick child. Is it justifiable for the victim to go and kill the scammer when the first just exploited the market? How does the victim perceive the market and its dangers? Can we all agree whether what occurred between these two people was moral or immoral?

Morality is as subjective as your unique 16 digit password. Even though you might agree with some letters and digits at some instances with some people, the actual sequential representation remains vastly different.

 

We were all born over the last 100 years. What we have come to know and understand as moral is nothing more than the cumulative perceptions of those around us. Much like people who lived thousands of years ago before us, we come from different cultures, different backgrounds and different ideological beliefs about the world. Morality is just a fancy word we invented in order to agree on how we would act upon something at a given time; we still rarely agree.

The solution does not lie in enforcing morality on others but rather creating communities that accept our own set of subjective morality. We are here as a species because we are different from one another. Life exists because of things being different—spontaneously claiming order over given instances in time-space. Morality is no different.

[ I hope some of you disagree with what I am saying. It demonstrates my point even further ]