Objectivity is often confused with certainty: an idea is supposedly objective if we can be sure about its truth. ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ as the saying goes, suggesting there is no standard, no foundation for beauty. So unlike scientific theories, ideas about beauty are arbitrary and subjective. Likewise, morality supposedly lacks the foundations needed to establish objective moral truths with any certainty.
But this is problematic since certainty is a chimera. Even the most robustly established scientific theories can turn out to be false, as was demonstrated at the beginning of the 20th century when one of the most successful scientific ideas in history – Newtonian mechanics – was overthrown and replaced with general relativity. Moreover, a need for foundations is absurd since it inevitably leads to an infinite regress: how can we be sure about our standards? What would support those foundations? If certainty does not exist, in what sense is science objective? Popper proposed we understand objectivity to mean that an idea is independently criticisable – e.g. an experimental result is objective when critical scientists can repeat the experiment, and scientific theories are objective in that they can be discussed and possibly refuted independently of their creators (cf. Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery). In Popper’s view, objectivity is not equivalent to truth. Instead, objectivity implies that an idea can be discussed independently. This standard for objectivity is both more realistic, since it does not contradict fallibility, and allows for near-perfect continuity between objectivity in science and objectivity in philosophy, including moral philosophy and aesthetics. Since as long as ideas about morality and aesthetics can be subjected to criticism – as long as we can search for errors in moral beliefs and convictions about beauty – morality and aesthetics are objective. In fact, subjectivity seems like a misbegotten concept. It is true that individuals have unique experiences, and that experiences are subjective (i.e. experiences belong to subjects), but subjective experiences can be criticised. So objectivity and subjectivity are not mutually exclusive concepts. For instance, our senses are error-prone, and we know this in part by having been told about visual illusions and selective attention tests. The existence of such illusions is a criticism of our senses, and this criticism clarifies our understanding of subjective experience. More generally, making sense of our sense impressions is what science is all about. Before the discovery that the earth is spherical, people genuinely experienced the earth as being flat. Likewise, we do not experience that the earth moves, though it does move. Moral theories (ideas about what to do next) are not subjective in the above-described sense. There do exist parochial moral truths, such as what to have for breakfast, and such theories depend in part on individual preferences, which one might call subjective – though again, in a fallible world, subjectivity and objectivity are not mutually exclusive concepts, as subjective preferences are criticisable. But more importantly, there are universal moral theories that do not depend on individual preferences – for instance, consider the moral claim that the means of error-correction should be preserved. This claim is criticisable. (One might object that a nihilist would disagree with this moral claim, but even – or especially – nihilists should want to know whether nihilism is false.) Perhaps this claim will someday become problematic, much like how scientific theories can turn out to be inadequate, but this would be a testament to the claim’s objectivity.
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