ethical objectivism the view that the objects of the most basic concepts of ethics (which may be supposed to be values, obligations, duties, oughts, rights, or what not) exist, or that facts about them hold, objectively and that similarly worded ethical statements by different persons make the same factual claims (and thus do not concern merely the speaker’s feelings). To say that a fact is objective, or that something has objective existence, is usually to say that its holding or existence is not derivative from its being thought to hold or exist. (In the Scholastic terminology still current in the seventeenth century ‘objective’ had the more or less contrary meaning of having status only as an object of thought.) In contrast, fact, or a thing’s existence, is subjective if it holds or exists only in the sense that it is thought to hold or exist, or that it is merely a convenient human posit for practical purposes. A fact holds, or an object exists, intersubjectively if somehow its acknowledgment is binding on all thinking subjects (or all subjects in some specified group), although it does not hold or exist independently of their thinking about it. Some thinkers suppose that intersubjectivity is all that can ever properly be meant by objectivity.
Objectivism may be naturalist or non-naturalist. The naturalist objectivist believes that values, duties, or whatever are natural phenomena detectable by introspection, perception, or scientific inference. Thus values may be identified with certain empirical qualities of (anybody’s) experience, or duties with empirical facts about the effects of action, e.g. as promoting or hindering social cohesion. The non-naturalist objectivist (eschewing what Moore called the naturalistic fallacy) believes that values or obligations (or whatever items he thinks most basic in ethics) exist independently of any belief about them, but that their existence is not a matter of any ordinary fact detectable in the above ways but can be revealed to ethical intuition as standing in a necessary (but not analytic) relation to natural phenomena. ‘Ethical subjectivism’ usually means the doctrine that ethical statements are simply reports on the speaker’s feelings (though, confusingly enough, such statements may be objectively true or false). Perhaps it ought to mean the doctrine that nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so. Attitude theories of morality, for which such statements express, rather than report upon, the speaker’s feelings, are also, despite the objections of their proponents, sometimes called subjectivist. In a more popular usage an objective matter of fact is one on which all reasonable persons can be expected to agree, while a matter is subjective if various alternative opinions can be accepted as reasonable. What is subjective in this sense may be quite objective in the more philosophical sense in question above. See also ETHICS, MOORE, MORAL REALIS. T.L.S.S.