Is all morality subjective?

While the evolutionary and psychological framework of moralization explains *how* we slide between subjectivity and objectivity, it suffers from significant blind spots. By treating this elasticity primarily as an individual cognitive survival mechanism, we overlook the structural, historical, and political forces that actively manipulate this scale. ## 1. The Political Economy of Moralization: A Missing Context The current framework assumes moralization is a natural cognitive response to harm. However, this ignores how economic structures and powerful institutions deliberately shift issues along the subjective-objective spectrum to protect their interests. In her landmark book *No Logo*, Naomi Klein details how multinational corporations actively work to keep labor exploitation categorized as a "subjective" consumer choice rather than an objective moral atrocity. By outsourcing labor, companies distance consumers from the physical harm of sweatshops. This matters because what we perceive as a "natural" cognitive buffer is often a highly engineered state of ignorance. To remedy this, we must integrate a materialist critique, analyzing how capital delays the moralization of systemic harms—such as fossil fuel extraction or labor exploitation—by keeping them framed as complex, subjective economic debates. ## 2. The WEIRD Bias: A Missing Cultural Perspective The assertion that we instinctively universalize the "Core Harm Principle" while treating purity or tradition as subjective is a distinct product of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. In his pioneering work on [Moral Foundations Theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory), psychologist Jonathan Haidt demonstrates that for many non-Western and conservative societies, violations of divinity, authority, and purity are not treated as "flexible, subjective conventions." > "The WEIRD moral profile is unique in its intense focus on harm and fairness... but most people in the world do not restrict their moral world to these two domains. For them, issues of authority, loyalty, and sanctity are not mere social conventions; they are objective moral realities." By assuming harm is the *only* trigger for objective moral outrage, our current model fails to explain global conflicts where blasphemy or ancestral disrespect triggers the same absolute, objective condemnation as physical violence. ## 3. The Epistemic Blind Spot: Who Decides What is "Harm"? The sliding scale model assumes "harm" is a self-evident, objective fact. In reality, the definition of harm is the ultimate site of political struggle. Philosopher Miranda Fricker's concept of [Epistemic Injustice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemic_injustice) reveals that marginalized groups often lack the societal "hermeneutical resources" to make their harms legible to the dominant class. For centuries, marital rape was not categorized under the "Core Harm Principle" because the legal and social systems did not recognize it as a violation of autonomy. If we rely solely on our current "automatic" cognitive settings to flag objective harms, we remain blind to systemic injustices that have not yet been granted the status of "objective" moral issues by those in power. We must ask: *whose* suffering is deemed an objective violation, and whose is dismissed as a subjective grievance?