I think morality has an objective foundation: what we do to one another has consequences for the lives we lead. Those consequences do not become matters of opinion because we disagree about what anyone is ultimately obligated to care about.
My proposal is to organize moral inquiry around how conduct affects the well-being of conscious beings, while treating the obligation to value that well-being as a distinct question. I want the difference between those questions to be explicit, because an answer to one can easily be mistaken for an answer to both.
The medicine analogy
Medicine does not suddenly become subjective because its goal is human improvement through better health and well-being. That purpose helps define what medicine is and what counts as a successful treatment.
People value health. That gives us a reason to investigate how bodies work, what harms them, and what helps them recover. But the investigation can produce factual answers even if we have not established that everyone has an ultimate obligation to value health.
A person might be indifferent to their health. Their indifference does not determine whether a treatment works. Someone else might misunderstand what improves their health. Their confidence does not make the treatment effective.
There are also difficult questions about what health means, which outcomes matter, and which tradeoffs a patient is willing to accept. Medicine contains ethical choices as well as empirical inquiry. The analogy concerns the inquiry: disagreement about goals does not turn every finding about how to achieve them into a personal preference.
I think the same distinction belongs at the center of morality. We can ask what conduct does to well-being, and we can ask why we should care about well-being. The second question does not have to be settled before the first becomes intelligible.
For that reason, I object to reframing morality in a way that removes well-being from the subject altogether. That would be like removing health and well-being from medicine, leaving a category of interventions with no account of what makes them medically beneficial. In the account I am defending, well-being gives moral evaluation its content. We can question why anyone ought to value it without defining it out of the field.
Three questions inside one debate
The phrase "objective morality" can conceal several different questions:
- What happens? What effects do an action or a social rule have on the people affected?
- What serves a specified standard? Given a particular account of well-being, which actions promote or undermine it?
- Why endorse that standard? Is anyone obligated to value well-being independently of their preferences or commitments?
The first concerns causal facts. The second evaluates conduct against an explicit standard and depends on both that standard and the facts. The third concerns the authority of the standard itself.
Objective answers to the first two questions do not establish an objective answer to the third. Establishing that something reduces suffering does not, by itself, establish an obligation to reduce suffering.
I am agnostic about obligations that hold independently of anyone's attitudes, often called stance-independent obligations. My argument does not require proving that they exist or that they are impossible. It concerns the objective assessment that remains available while that question is open.
When I describe that assessment as objective, I mean that its conclusions must answer to evidence. Endorsing a practice does not make it effective, and disliking a finding does not make it false.
The structure is conduct and consequences
Underneath the language of good and bad is a relationship we can investigate: conduct, in a particular context, produces consequences.
The context can be enormously complicated. It includes the people involved, their histories and expectations, the institutions around them, and the effects that unfold over time. A moral rule also changes the context of future actions by changing what people expect from one another.
That complexity is a reason to investigate carefully. It does not establish that there is nothing factual to investigate.
Suppose a community says that a particular rule protects its members. Whether it actually protects them is a question about the world. The rule might help, do nothing, or produce the harm it was supposed to prevent. Calling it virtuous cannot settle which of those things happens.
This gives us a way to criticize a moral system even when we provisionally accept its goals. If it claims to improve people's lives while its practices reliably undermine that aim, there is a failure to explain. Agreement with the rule is insufficient evidence that it works.
Good relative to a function
We already evaluate other things this way.
A good bridge serves some purpose: carrying a specified load across a particular span under particular conditions. We choose to care about crossing safely. Once that purpose is clear, there are factual questions about which designs can do it.
There does not have to be one best bridge for every situation. Different designs can satisfy the same requirements. Other designs fail them. A preference for a particular color does not settle the bridge's load capacity.
My proposal gives moral evaluation a function too: helping conscious beings live together, reduce suffering, and flourish. On that account, calling conduct good means assessing how it contributes to those ends, including its effects on everyone affected.
Someone can challenge that proposed function. They can argue that morality must concern something else, or that well-being leaves out something essential. Those are substantive objections. Repeating that morality concerns right and wrong still leaves the question of what gives those terms their content.
Context and probability are compatible with objectivity
An objective assessment does not require the same recommendation in every situation.
A treatment can help one patient and harm another. The difference may be explained by facts about their bodies. We would not improve the assessment by removing those facts and insisting that the treatment must be good or bad in isolation.
The same applies to conduct. Some people seek particular painful experiences. That makes consent, communication, and the character of the experience relevant to assessing its effects. It does not justify assuming that another person welcomes pain.
Likewise, the pleasure of someone causing harm cannot settle the assessment while the experience of the person harmed disappears from view. The scope I am proposing includes everyone affected. Whether their interests can be reduced to a single measure is a further problem that needs an argument.
The animal question also requires separating different issues: which beings we include in our concern, what they can experience, and what our actions do to them. Evidence can inform the latter questions without automatically deciding the first.
Many conclusions will be probabilistic. A rule may tend to improve outcomes without succeeding in every case. We may have several defensible options and no uniquely best action. Objectivity requires taking the evidence and its uncertainty seriously; it does not require certainty or a universal instruction stripped of context.
Subjective experience can be studied objectively
Well-being involves experience. That does not make every claim about experience a matter of the observer's opinion.
Someone's suffering is experienced from their point of view. Whether they are suffering, what contributes to it, and what changes it can nevertheless be subjects of inquiry. Their preferences may be part of the explanation. A fact about a preference is different from a finding being true merely because the investigator prefers it.
We can make this distinction clearer by removing the evaluative words altogether. Imagine calling higher and lower levels of a specified well-being measure "red" and "blue," and calling actions that move it in those directions "green" and "purple."
Once the criteria are clear, classifying an action can be a factual task. Nothing about the classification alone establishes that everyone ought to choose green. Putting the words good and bad back in should not make us lose track of that separation.
Definitions and measurement still matter. We have to explain what we mean by well-being, which experiences a measure captures, whose lives count, and how we handle conflicts between outcomes. An objective result under a poor measure can be a poor guide to flourishing. The ability to measure something does not establish that we have measured everything that matters.
The strongest objection concerns the name
A substantial objection is that calling the objective study of outcomes "objective morality" changes the subject from whether right and wrong themselves have authority independent of anyone's commitments.
That objection identifies the limit of my argument. If objective morality means stance-independent moral obligations, then demonstrating objective consequences does not establish objective morality in that sense. Someone who rejects those obligations could accept the causal claims I have made here.
My concern is making that the exclusive meaning of the broader question. I want to retain morality's relationship to well-being when assessing its objectivity, just as we retain medicine's relationship to health. Removing that relationship changes the inquiry before its objectivity has been assessed.
I understand why someone would reserve the phrase for the foundational issue. Different fields can legitimately use the same words differently. My reason for preferring another framing is practical: I want moral discussion to keep attention on whether our conduct and institutions actually serve the lives they claim to serve.
"Do stance-independent moral obligations exist?" states the foundational question directly. "Can we objectively assess how conduct affects well-being?" states the empirical question directly. Saying only "morality is subjective" can blur them, particularly when it is heard as saying that judgments about conduct are arbitrary.
That is the confusion I am criticizing. Uncertainty about ultimate obligation should not become an excuse to disregard evidence about harm, cooperation, or flourishing.
A substantive proposal with precedents
Connecting morality to human functioning and well-being has philosophical precedents. The relevant thinkers make different arguments, so I would not treat them as a single school endorsing everything I have said.
In Moral Reality, Paul Bloomfield develops a defense of moral realism using physical health as a model for moral goodness. His account gives the analogy a much more extensive role than my claim about assessing conduct against specified goals. Moral Reality, Oxford University Press.
Sam Harris explicitly separates moral understanding from an additional imperative to behave well in his clarification of The Moral Landscape. He also argues that subjective experience can be investigated objectively. Facts & Values.
Oliver Scott Curry proposes understanding morality through cooperation and using game theory to test claims about cooperative behavior. That provides another example of giving moral concepts substantive content that can be investigated. The Science of Morality.
These approaches give us arguments to examine. A dictionary definition cannot decide between them, and their existence does not settle which account is best. My own reason for centering well-being is the practical function I think moral inquiry should serve.
What I want moral inquiry to do
I want us to be able to examine a rule, an action, or an institution and ask what it actually does to the people living with it. Whose suffering does it reduce? Whose does it conceal? Does it achieve its stated purpose? What evidence would make us change it?
Answering those questions requires making our standards explicit and being willing to revise our beliefs about what serves them. It also requires acknowledging where conflicting values leave a decision unresolved. Neither step requires pretending that the consequences themselves are arbitrary.
That is the sense in which I am arguing for objective morality: an inquiry grounded in the realities of conduct and well-being, with the question of ultimate obligation stated separately. Our uncertainty about why we ought to care should not erase what we can learn about what caring effectively involves.