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Originally Posted by pulvis
Objective moral values exist whether any human mind exists to hold them. A subjective moral value exists only in the mind of the inventor. Subjective moral values are relative to the individual.
The idea that moral values are do to the subjective whims of God is one of the horns of Euthyphro's Dilemma. I think that's a false dilemma in that moral values stem from God and His infinite nature of goodness. God is Good. He does not decide to be good, see John 1 4:8.
I don't believe an action is morally good because God commanded it, but I do believe God only commands morally good commandments. There is a significant difference.
You are here describing your own beliefs, which is fine, but I was more interested in your general definition of these terms. For instance, the reason I was bringing up Divine Command is because many people take the other horn of the dilemma and acknowledge that morality is ultimately based on God's own subjective preferences for the universe. Now, because God is God, these people still think that these subjective preferences are universal and binding on all people, but nonetheless, they are still based ultimately not on an external fact of the universe, but on the subjectivity of God. So I don't know if you would still consider this a subjective or objective morality.
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A subjective moral system is incoherent because there is no way for a person to judge another person wrong since their response could just be that they have a different set of subjective values relative to me.
A couple responses. First, this argument assumes that it is possible for another person to have a different set of subjective values. This is plausibly true when thinking of other possible worlds, but it could be false when restricting the set of persons to humans in the actual world. In fact, this was David Hume's own view, that while morality is ultimately based in our passions rather than reason, the nature of our passions have elements common to all humans.
Now, you might think that isn't good enough, that a morality worth calling it such must apply metaphysically to all creatures. Okay. But why? Here there is a deeper problem that many moral realists struggle to deal with. That is, they claim that subjective morality fails to be a true morality because true morality has the features of objective morality, such as universality. Well, no it doesn't - at least, not according to those who accept subjective morality as accurate. If you want to claim that subjective morality is incoherent, you can't do so by smuggling in an account of morality as objective.
For instance, many believers in subjective morality are also moral relativists. A moral relativist doesn't have the problem you claim here. Their moral claims are all indexed to a particular perspective. Yes, it is true that my claim that it is wrong for you to steal from me is based on my own moral attitudes or preferences, and you might have different ones, but so what? That is only incoherent if you think that moral attitudes and preferences are also supposed to all be congruent, but that is not an assumption of moral relativism. There are obviously practical problems in how to resolve conflicts between moral perspectives, but that is not a matter of incoherence.