Is all morality subjective?

Why is it that we can comfortably treat our culinary choices as matters of personal taste, yet we react with outrage if someone suggests that human chattel slavery is merely a "cultural preference"? This paradox reveals that we do not apply moral subjectivity uniformly. Instead, our minds operate on a sliding scale of moral objectivity, a phenomenon known in cognitive science and psychology as **moralization**. We dynamically shift our ethical framing depending on the topic, treating some issues as absolute, universal laws and others as flexible, subjective conventions. ## The Spectrum of Moralization: From Meat to Slavery To understand this selective subjectivity, we can look at how public consciousness shifts over time. In his influential research on [Moralization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moralization), psychologist Paul Rozin explored how neutral preferences transform into strict moral values. Consider the contemporary debate over eating meat. For many, vegetarianism is a subjective preference, akin to liking spicy food. For others, it has undergone moralization and is viewed as a strict ethical duty. However, even the most ardent vegans rarely view meat-eating with the same category of absolute, historical condemnation that we reserve for transatlantic slavery. This distinction rests on what philosopher Joshua Greene calls the "tribal" versus "universal" settings of our moral brains. In his book *Moral Tribes*, Greene argues that our brains possess both automatic, emotion-driven settings and manual, cognitive settings: > "The moral brain is like a dual-mode camera with automatic settings... and a manual mode... Moral intuition is an automatic cognitive device, a shortcut for solving the complex cognitive problems of social life." When evaluating historical atrocities like slavery, our "automatic" settings trigger an uncompromising, objective response because the survival and cooperation of our species rely on absolute prohibitions against in-group harm. For evolving issues like animal welfare or environmentalism, we often remain in "manual mode," allowing us to tolerate subjective disagreement because the social contract is still actively negotiating these boundaries. ## The "Asymmetry Thesis" in Action This selective application of subjectivity creates what philosophers call the **Asymmetry Thesis**. We behave as moral realists when the stakes involve immediate, physical harm to humans, but we lean toward subjectivism when the stakes involve purity, tradition, or emerging ethical frontiers. 1. **The Core Harm Principle:** Actions that violate basic bodily autonomy (e.g., slavery, murder) are pushed to the extreme "objective" end of our cognitive spectrum. We instinctively reject subjectivism here because treating slavery as "subjective" threatens the very foundation of social coordination. 2. **The Frontier of Moral Expansion:** Issues like dietary choices, intellectual property, or even assisted dying exist in a zone of active debate. Because society has not reached a consensus, we tolerate moral subjectivism as a cognitive buffer, allowing us to disagree without immediately tribalizing or dehumanizing our neighbors. Ultimately, our response to moral subjectivity is not a coherent philosophical stance, but a psychological survival mechanism. We are subjective where we can afford to be, and objective where we must be.