Chapter 4 Summary

Driver examines the objectivity of moral judgments. She asks whether moral claims, like ordinary or scientific descriptive claims about our shared, external world, have the quality of being true or false independently of what different people happen to believe. On this view, a moral judgment such as “torture is wrong” would have a truth-value that does not vary according to how people feel or what they think. Instead, it would describe moral reality as it is in itself. The alternative possibility that she considers is that moral claims are true or false in a way that is relative to the varying beliefs, preferences, or other favorable or unfavorable attitudes of individuals. She calls this view subjectivism. She offers a twofold critique of subjectivism. Firstly, it seems to entail the impossibility of genuine moral disagreement. If all it means for one person to say that torture is wrong is that she disapproves of it, how can someone else dispute this? In any event, moral argument seems to be about more than just discovering what one’s interlocutor happens to believe. And secondly, some acts seem morally right or wrong regardless of what people believe. It seems it can’t be true in any sense that genocide is right, even when a genocidal person says it is. Since both of these apparent implications of subjectivism are implausible, Driver concludes that something other than mere individual belief must play a role in making a moral judgment true or false, or in making a given practice morally right or wrong.