Do We Experience Morality As Objective Truth?
How We Can Tell the Difference Between Subjective & Objective Truth Claims
“He should not have raped that woman”
“That dictator should not have committed genocide”
“The son should have helped his mother carry the groceries inside”
These are ordinary moral statements that you probably hear and say yourself everyday.
But what kind of claims are these?
Are moral claims subjective, meaning they arise from personal feelings, preferences, or inner states? Or are they objective, meaning they’re true or false independently of what anyone thinks or feels?
I’m writing this article because I’m frequently asked this exact question by moral subjectivists. They’ll ask something like: how can you tell the difference between a subjective inner state and an objective claim about the world? What’s the real difference between saying “I’m hungry” and saying “it’s wrong to rape”? Why shouldn’t we think that both of these are just reports of internal experience?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently because I think it’s a fair question.
After all, everything we experience is experienced subjectively. We never step outside our own consciousness. Every perception, belief, sensation, and thought is had from the inside. In that sense, all experience is subjective.
But that observation, while true, doesn’t settle the issue.
The real question is not whether experiences are had subjectively. The real question is this:
How can we tell when we are merely describing something that arises from our own mental state, and when we are making a claim about something that exists independently of our mental states?
That is the question I want to answer here.
I’m going to argue that ordinary moral claims function as objective claims, not merely subjective reports. But before we can see that clearly, we need to slow down and get our categories straight. We need to understand what a subjective claim is, what an objective claim is, and how to tell the difference between the two.
Only then can we properly understand what kind of claims moral statements actually are.
Subjective Claims
A subjective claim, as I’m using the term here, is a claim whose truth conditions are grounded in a subject’s mental states. In other words, whether the claim is true depends on the experiences, attitudes, or preferences of a particular subject.
Claims like “I’m hungry,” “I’m in pain,” or “I like rock music” are standard examples. These are first-person reports of inner experience. Their truth depends on what the subject is actually experiencing.
But it’s important to be careful here.
Saying that a claim is subjective doesn’t mean it can’t be true. It doesn’t mean that anything goes. And it does not mean that people are infallible about their own experiences. People can be confused, mistaken, or self-deceived. Someone might misinterpret anxiety as hunger, or boredom as sadness, or physical discomfort as pain.
Still, there is a crucial asymmetry.
When someone sincerely reports their own experience, we treat that report as having a special kind of authority. The reason is simple. There is no external fact to appeal to that could settle the matter independently of the subject. The experience itself—by the subject—is what makes the claim true or false.
That’s what I mean by a subjective truth. The subject is not merely describing a fact. The subject is the essential part of what makes the claim true.
I want to add here that there can be truths about a subject that are not subjective truths. For example, if someone says that Donald Trump’s hair is blonde, that is a claim about a subject, but it is not a subjective claim. Its truth does not arise from Trump’s mental states. It is an external fact that could be true or false regardless of what Trump thinks, feels, or experiences.
So the key distinction is not whether a claim is about a person. The key distinction is whether the truth of the claim is grounded in a person’s mental states or not.
From this, we can say the following:
If the truth of a claim is grounded in a subject’s mental states, then it is a subjective claim.
With that clarified, we can now turn to objective claims.
Objective Claims
An objective claim is a claim whose truth does not depend on what anyone believes, prefers, or experiences. Its truth conditions exist independently of any individual mind.
When we say things like “the Earth is round,” “2 plus 2 equals 4,” or “water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit at standard atmospheric pressure,” we’re making objective claims. These claims can be true or false regardless of how anyone feels about them.
This is the defining feature of an objective claim.
With objective claims, sincerity doesn’t protect a person from being wrong. Someone can be completely honest, intellectually serious, and confident, and still be in error when making an objective claim. That’s because the truth of the claim doesn’t come from the subject. The subject making the claim is trying to accurately track a truth that exists independently of their mental state.
It’s also important to clarify what objective claims don’t require.
Objective claims have nothing to do with easy verification. There can be objective truths that no one ever discovers. There can be objective claims that are difficult, controversial, or permanently inaccessible. As long as their truth does not arise from mental states, they are still objective claims.
In other words, Objectivity is a metaphysical feature, not an epistemic one.
Three Key Distinctions Between Subjective Claims and Objective Claims
With these definitions in place, we can now identify several practical differences between subjective and objective claims. These differences show up clearly in how we reason, disagree, and talk.
1. The speaker is part of the truth conditions only for subjective claims
Imagine you read the sentence “I’m hungry” written on a piece of paper. Someone asks you whether the claim is true.
If you don’t know who wrote it, when they wrote it, or what they were experiencing at the time, you’d have no way of evaluating the claim as true or false. The claim can’t even be assessed without identifying the subject. That’s because the subject’s mental state is what makes the claim true or not.
Now contrast this with an objective claim.
Take the statement “water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit at standard atmospheric pressure.” If someone asks whether this claim is true, we don’t need to know who said it. The identity of the speaker is irrelevant to the truth of the claim itself. There is an exception to this rule, in matters for testimony it does matter who makes the claim because witness credibility is very important when we want to determine if what they say its true or not. But setting aside testimony evidence and claims that are of that nature, we don’t need to know who makes the claim to determine if the claim is true.
This is the key difference.
With subjective claims, identifying the subject making the claim is essential because the subject is what determines the truth or falsity of the claim. With objective claims, the truth conditions don’t rely and are independent of the person that states the claim.
2. Objective claims allow for sincere error
Consider how disagreement works.
If someone makes a subjective claim like “I’m hungry” and we disagree with them, the disagreement usually targets sincerity or confusion. If someone says “I like pineapple on pizza” and you disagree, you’re really questioning whether they’re being honest or accurately reporting their experience. The disagreement will necessarily have to be about the subject making the claim. “You hate pineapple pizza, you threw an entire one away last week while holding your nose!”
Subjective claims are almost never questioned because to question them requires us to likely insult the person making the claim. This is because you either have to say they’re lying, or that they’re confused about what they say.
But objective claims are different.
With objective claims, disagreement doesn’t require accusing someone of lying or being confused. A person can be fully sincere, wrong, and you’re not likely to insult them by disagreeing with them.
For example, someone might sincerely believe that the Earth is flat. We can accept their sincerity while still saying we believe they’re mistaken. And when we attempt to show that they’re wrong, we don’t need to say anything about them, their sincerity, or their mental clarity.
A famous example of this comes from mathematics. The great thinker Bertrand Russell believed that all of mathematics could be grounded in logic and set theory. He devoted enormous effort to his project of proving it. In the course of working on it, he discovered what is now known as Russell’s Paradox, which revealed a contradiction in the system he was developing. There was an objective truth about the matter that showed his original assumptions were mistaken, even though he sincerely believed they were correct. And he ultimately revised his views because of that truth.
That’s how objective inquiry works. The objective truth can correct or prove us wrong even about our sincere beliefs.
3. Objective claims invite uncertainty, debate, and justification
When people report their own experiences by making subjective claims, they usually do so directly. Typically the claim is straightforward, “I’m in pain,” or, “I love thunder storms.” They don’t normally hedge with phrases like “I think” or “I might be wrong,” because their own experience is what grounds the claim.
By contrast, objective claims regularly involve uncertainty, argument, and justification. People say things like “I believe,” “it seems,” or “I could be mistaken,” precisely because they recognize that the truth exists independently of them which means they could be wrong about what they perceive.
Why Moral Claims Are Objective Claims
Now we can apply these three distinctions directly to moral claims.
1. Moral claims do not depend on who asserts them
When we encounter claims like “it’s wrong to rape” or “genocide is evil,” we don’t need to know who made the claim in order to begin evaluating it. We can assess the claim itself.
That’s not how subjective claims work. With claims like “I like pizza” or “I’m in pain,” identifying the subject making the claim is essential for determining whether or not the claim is true. With moral claims we can think about whether they’re true without needing to know who said it.
This shows that moral claims don’t have subjects built into their truth conditions in the way subjective claims do.
2. Moral disagreement persists even when sincerity is guaranteed
Imagine a possible world in which people can’t lie or be confused about their own mental states. Every report of inner experience is guaranteed to be sincere and accurate.
In such a world, disagreement about subjective experience would disappear. No one would dispute claims like “I’m hungry” or “I’m in pain.”
Now imagine someone in this same world saying things like:
• It is acceptable to eat a child
• Adolf Hitler did nothing wrong
• A politician ought to exploit his constituents for personal gain
Would disagreement disappear?
Obviously not.
People would still say, “That’s wrong.” And they would not mean “that conflicts with my preferences.” They would mean that the person is mistaken about how things ought to be.
This shows that moral disagreement is not merely about differing inner states. It’s disagreement about what’s objectively true.
Notice also that in the case of moral claims, it doesn’t insult the person when you don’t agree with them. If you say “I’m hungry” and someone says “no you aren’t” that would be an insult. But what if you say “abortion is evil” and someone says “no it isn’t.” That might concern you, it might anger you, but it wouldn’t insult you.
This means that moral claims are objective in nature, not subjective, because when people say our moral claims are wrong we aren’t personally insulted and we don’t feel that they’re calling us liars or confused about our own experience.
3. Moral reasoning involves uncertainty, debate, and discovery
Moral reasoning often involves difficult cases, hesitation, and argument. People struggle with dilemmas, weigh reasons, and revise their judgments.
If moral claims were merely expressions of inner states, this would make no sense. We have direct access to our own feelings. There would be nothing to discover and nothing to reason about.
But moral reasoning looks exactly like reasoning in other objective domains. Some truths are obvious. Others are hard. Vagueness and difficulty do not imply subjectivity. They imply that the truth does not originate from us so it’s much more difficult to get to.
From Moral Discourse to Moral Reality
At this point, an important question arises.
Could all of this be a mistake? Could moral language merely imitate objective discourse even though there are no objective moral facts?
This is the view taken by positions like expressivism and error theory.
But these views come at a cost.
They require us to say that moral language systematically misrepresents what we’re doing. They require us to reinterpret disagreement, error, obligation, and justification in ways that don’t match our actual practices.
The simpler explanation is that our moral discourse tracks reality. We argue, correct, hesitate, and condemn in morality for the same reason we do in mathematics and logic. Because we’re trying to grasp truths that exist independently of us.
That’s the best explanation of how morality actually functions.
But I want to be clear. I’m not saying, “we talk about morality as if it’s objective, therefore it’s objective.” That wouldn’t be a good argument. The point of this article is to show how we normally experience and discuss subjective truths vs objective truths and to make the case that we experience morality as objective. I also think that if we experience something as objective, we should treat it as such unless we have a good reason to think our experience is wrong, just as we do with every other domain of apparent objectivity (logic, math, etc).
At this point, I’m aware that some people are going to disagree with my argument. But there are really only two ways someone can do that.
The first option is to argue that moral claims don’t actually fall under the distinctions I’ve laid out for objective claims. In other words, someone could try to show that when we make moral claims, we’re really making subjective claims after all. They’d have to demonstrate that moral claims behave like reports of inner states rather than claims about something independent of us. But I think I’ve already made a strong case that moral claims line up squarely with objective claims, not subjective ones, and I don’t think this route is promising.
The second option is more demanding. Someone could argue that my standard for distinguishing between subjective and objective claims is wrong. But to do that they’d have to provide an alternative standard. They’d have to explain how we actually tell whether a claim is subjective or objective, make the case that their standard is better than mine, and then show that, under that new standard, moral claims fall on the subjective side rather than the objective one.
That’s a two-step burden. And I don’t think anyone is likely to meet it, because the distinctions I’ve appealed to are the same distinctions we rely on everywhere else when we talk about objectivity.
If someone responds by saying, “Yes, you’ve given a standard, and you’ve shown that we experience morality as an objective domain, but we should still think morality is subjective anyway,” then there’s no principled reason not to make the same move across the board.
Why shouldn’t we say the same thing about logic? Or about rules of inference? Or about mathematics? After all, we experience those as objective too. We talk about them as if they’re objective. But if that experience can just be dismissed without explanation, as many will want to do here in the moral case, why can’t it be dismissed everywhere else?
And here’s the deeper problem. In order to say that my argument is wrong, incorrect, or unsound, you have to appeal to objectivity. You can’t say, “I just don’t like your argument,” and think that counts as a rebuttal. To say that my argument is wrong is to say that there’s a truth of the matter independent of how either of us feels about it.
But if everything is subjective, then there’s no such thing as a bad argument. There are only disliked arguments. And once you go there, rational disagreement collapses entirely. All that’s left is the exchange of mental states.
But that position destroys itself. To claim that there is no objective truth is itself to make an objective claim. And to argue for error theory or global subjectivism while relying on logic, inference, and standards of correctness is to saw off the very branch you’re sitting on.
So if someone wants to say that morality is subjective in light of this argument, they really only have two options. They must either show that moral claims actually fit the subjective distinctions I’ve described, or they must reject my standard altogether, replace it with a better one, and then demonstrate that moral claims fall on the subjective side under that new framework.
Any rebuttal that doesn’t do one of these two things is not a rebuttal and disagreeing with my argument for how we determine subjective vs objective claims without a new standard is self-defeating.
Why This All Matters
At this point, some people ask why any of this matters.
It matters because if moral claims were merely subjective, then genuine moral error would disappear. As long as someone was sincere, they could not be wrong. Condemnation would collapse into dislike and arbitrary preferences. Obligations would become fictional.
Social enforcement might still exist, but it would no longer be grounded in moral truth. Justice would become a matter of power or agreement, not rightness.
But that’s not how we actually think or live.
When we say that someone acted wrongly, we mean that they violated a real obligation, regardless of what they believed. Responsibility, blame, and justice only make sense if morality is objective.
And that’s exactly how morality functions in our experience.
Conclusion
We began with a simple but important question. When we make moral claims, are we merely reporting our inner states, or are we saying something that’s true independently of us?
By carefully distinguishing between subjective and objective claims, the answer becomes clear.
Moral claims do not function like reports of inner experience. They function like claims about reality. They allow for sincere error. They invite disagreement and justification. They stand in judgment over us rather than arising from us. And we aren’t personally insulted when people question them.
Morality looks far more like reason or mathematics than like preference or taste. Some moral truths are obvious. Others are difficult. We debate them not because they come from our feelings, but because we’re trying to discover how we ought to act.
Because we experience morality as objective, we should treat it as such. To call morality into question is to undermine everything we experience as objective, because if we can be wrong about how we experience morality, why can’t we be wrong about all our other objective experiences as well?
No.
Moral claims are objective claims. They are not expressions of taste or feeling. They are claims about how things ought to be, claims that can be true or false regardless of what anyone happens to believe.
In short, morality isn’t something we invent. It’s something we answer to. It exists outside of us, above us, and independently of us.
It exists objectively.