Blog Post- A Few Thoughts on “Objectivity” and “Subjectivity”

If you prowl the bowels of internet comment sections, particularly those around art, music, philosophy, and more, you will find many people arguing about whether things are “subjective” or “objective”. That is, roughly speaking, whether they depend on a mind or not. They will discuss whether there are any “objective standards for art”, whether there is “objective morality without God”, or whether “music is getting worse, objectively”.

I am a relatively simple person - I enjoy philosophy, and like it when people get excited about philosophical questions. However, if I could make one small suggestion, I think our terminology is getting in the way of our discussions here. I think a lot of what people are trying to get at here when they talk about subjectivity and objectivity, is the extent to which a particular experience does or can vary between individuals.

Take a classic philosophical problem I see posed online: “Can there be objective goodness without God?”. On the face of it, this is a question about objectivity. But upon closer inspection, that framing makes very little sense. After all, ”objective” normally means “mind-independent”, and in a divine command theory system of morality, morals are necessarily dependent on the mind of God.

However, when you dig into why people care about this question, you see that they are less concerned about objectivity, but with a lack of variance with what can be viewed as “morally correct”. This is reflected in the way Dostoevsky poses the question: “Without God, everything is permitted” (though the context of that phrase is its own interesting topic). The worry is that without the existence of God, our morality could shoot off in a million different directions, or cease to exist altogether, with every course of action being just as valuable as any other.

On the other hand, take something that is inarguably subjective - the experience of pain. There is no question that were all conscious minds to suddenly cease to exist, there would be no such thing as “pain” anymore. It is thus subjective. So why don’t we have the same sorts of debate about pain as we have about other emotional or subjective experiences. Why don’t we say that “pain is simply a matter of perspective” or “you have your definition of pain, and I have mine”? Again, we see that the reason is probably because there is so little perceived variation in how people act when they are in pain, and thus we infer there is little variation in how people experience pain. For all intents and purposes, although pain is subjective, it has some of the most important properties of objectivity. It remains practically stable over time and between people.

But why does this matter? Well, I suspect that while we spend a lot of time talking about the objectivity or subjectivity of different experiences or properties, we are potentially skimming over some very important questions.

Take the debate around what is “beautiful”. In popular discourse, so much of the discussion about beauty is taken up with subjectivist platitudes like “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, or the requisite objectivist reaction, which points to some historically great work of art and challenges anyone to not find it beautiful, or declares that they do not care what other people think, their definition of beauty is objectively correct.

This immediately kills any interesting discussion in the water. But if we changed our framing to recognize that what we often care about is not subjectivity or objectivity, but variation and change, then a whole series of questions become salient and interesting, that would otherwise go unasked.

For example, to what extent do people within a community converge on what they deem “beautiful” or “ugly”? Do we measure this using a simple emotional reaction? Well, it seems like things get complicated, because today we have a bunch of words that signal aesthetic appreciation while explicitly denying that something is beautiful (see the term “ugly-hot”, or people’s professed love and attraction to the “medium-ugly”). If we do get significant convergence within a given set of people, we can plausibly define a definition of the word “beauty” within that linguistic community. We can see how far you have to drift to the outskirts of that community before the usage begins to shift.

Then you can extend the question among groups of communities. Are there things that whole nations consistently consider “beautiful”? Is there more convergence on definitions of beauty about art or architecture than there are about people? Is it that someone needs to hold certain characteristics to be considered above a minimum level of beauty, but then there is wide divergence over what people consider the most beautiful?

Finally, as a particularly ambitious anthropological project, are there things that all humans universally (or near-universally) consider beautiful? Some psychologists have proposed a good candidate for this are wide natural landscapes, carting broad evolutionary reasons. However, testing this among cross sections of different cultures would be a significant undertaking. If there were some things that genuinely were universally considered beautiful, and moreover this remained stable across time and had little variation within cultures, then we approach something like what God does in religious morality. We would have a definition of beauty that is technically subjective, but is stable and secure.

It could be that none of this comes to pass (I myself am skeptical). But my point is that these are questions we can make genuine and significant progress on. They are interesting questions to pose, and ones from which we can draw practical conclusions.

I have buried the lead here a little bit. The reason for this post was that I have become enraptured with a seemingly simple and intuitive observation by the philosopher of science Hasok Chang, which seems so obvious on reflection, yet is so often overlooked in our popular discourse. Just because something is mind-dependent, does not mean that it is mind-controlled, nor does it mean that it will vary considerably between people.

To call something “subjective” is not the same thing as saying that “anything goes”, and to be fair, most philosophers recognize this. But the connection has become so strong in our popular discussions, that I thought it was worth pointing out. Sometimes there is a really quite straightforward points, with really quite profound consequences.