Ethical Subjectivism
Is Morality Relative to Individuals?
Ethical or moral subjectivism is not simply the view that different people have different moral duties. That is a truism. I do not have a duty to pay your credit card bill; you do. You do not have a duty see that my daughter gets to school on time; I do. No one, not even a moral objectivist, will deny that different people have different moral obligations.
What moral objectivists hold is that morality treats all people equally. No one, according to moral objectivism, has different duties simply because of who they are. If one person in one situation has a particular duty, then, according to moral objectivism, anyone else in a relevantly similar situation has the same duty. It is the situation, and not the person in the situation, that fixes the moral facts.
Ethical subjectivism, then, holds not just that different people have different moral duties, but that different people in relevantly similar situations have different moral duties. To put it another way, ethical subjectivism holds that a full description of all of the morally relevant features of a situation will make reference to who it is that is in that situation. The objective features of the situation alone do not fix the moral facts.
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