Is morality just opinion?

There is a point in most of these conversations where the other person stops defending the practice and starts questioning whether right and wrong mean anything at all. It arrives as “that is just your opinion”, or “morality is subjective”, or “who are you to judge”.

Those are not claims about animals. They are claims about what we are doing when we call anything right or wrong, which is a much older question. Each of the five beliefs below is a serious answer to it, held by people who have thought about it carefully, so none of them deserves to be brushed aside.

You do not need any background to follow them. Each one is named, explained in ordinary language, and then applied to this argument specifically.

Moral realism is the belief that there are moral facts, and that moral claims are true or false depending on whether they get those facts right. Cruelty is not wrong because we disapprove of it. We disapprove of it because it is wrong.

On this view, if everyone on earth forgot that torturing a child was wrong, it would still be wrong. They would simply all be mistaken, in the way a room full of people can be mistaken about the boiling point of water.

Almost everyone talks as though this is true, including people who deny it ten minutes later. We say things are wrong rather than that we dislike them. We treat the abolition of slavery as something people worked out, not as a change in fashion. And we expect each other to answer reasons rather than just state preferences.

For veganismIt settles nothing on its own, and that is the point. If realism is true, then whether farming animals is wrong is a real question with a real answer, and the arguments on this site are the ordinary business of working out which answer is right. It helps neither side. It just means there is something to be right about.

The problemIt has to say what moral facts actually are, and how anyone finds out about them. J. L. Mackie pressed this hard: the facts realism needs would be unlike anything else we claim to know about, and knowing them would need a way of detecting them that nobody can point to.

Relativism is the belief that right and wrong depend on the culture you belong to, and that there is no neutral place to stand in order to judge between cultures. What is wrong here can be genuinely acceptable there, with no further fact to settle it.

In this argument it usually arrives as tradition or heritage: this is how we have always eaten, it is part of who we are, and veganism is a Western idea being pushed on everyone else.

The strongest version has real force, and anyone who has not felt it has not understood the objection. Moral confidence has a bad record. Colonialism was carried out by people certain they were improving those they ruled, and outsiders judging a practice from a distance usually understand it less well than they think.

For veganismIt is used to say that eating animals is part of a way of life, and that you have no standing to question it from outside.

Where it landsIt cannot do that work, for two reasons. It undercuts itself: if every moral claim is only true relative to a culture, then so is the rule that outsiders should not judge, and that rule has no authority over anyone who does not already hold it. And nobody really believes it. The person reaching for relativism will still condemn practices from other cultures that they find appalling, which means they are not a relativist. They think this particular practice is acceptable.

AlsoCultures are not single things, and they change. There are vegans in every culture on earth, including the ones most associated with meat, so “my culture” usually turns out to mean “what I grew up with”. Taken strictly, the belief protects any practice simply because it is established, which is the appeal to tradition in a philosophical coat.

One honest concession. Where a community really does depend on animals to survive, that is not relativism at all. It is the limit written into the definition of veganism itself, which asks what is possible and practicable rather than what is ideal. The Inuit hunter and the London commuter are not in the same position, and nobody serious pretends otherwise.

What possible and practicable means

Subjectivism is the belief that when you call something wrong, you are describing your own attitude to it rather than the thing itself. “Wrong” works roughly the way “disgusting” does: it reports something true about the speaker.

So “farming animals is wrong” comes out as “I disapprove of farming animals”, which can be perfectly true, and tells you nothing about farming.

For veganismIt produces the familiar “it is wrong for you, not for me”. That sounds tolerant and generous. What it actually does is end the conversation while appearing to continue it.

Where it landsIt makes disagreement impossible, which is an odd thing to adopt in the middle of one. If “wrong” just means “I disapprove”, then when you say farming is wrong and I say it is not, we are both telling the truth about ourselves and there is nothing left to discuss. That is plainly not what either of us meant.

AlsoIt makes moral progress impossible to describe. You can hardly be mistaken about your own attitudes, so on this view nobody has ever been wrong about anything, and the people who changed their minds about slavery did not learn something. They just came to feel differently.

Worth separatingSubjectivism and emotivism get used as though they were the same and they are not. Subjectivism says moral claims are statements of fact about the speaker, so they can be true. Emotivism, next, says they are not statements of fact at all.

Emotivism is the belief that moral statements do not describe anything. When you say cruelty is wrong you are not reporting a fact, you are expressing how you feel and inviting others to feel the same. It is closer to booing than to stating something.

A. J. Ayer argued that moral language has no factual content at all. C. L. Stevenson added that what it is really for is persuasion: moral talk is how we bring each other round.

For veganismThis is what nearly everyone is reaching for with “that is just your opinion”. It is the single most common move in the whole debate, and if it worked it would end this site rather than any one argument on it.

Where it landsNowhere, as a defence, because it is completely general. Someone who says animal ethics is only a matter of taste has also said that torturing a dog for entertainment is only a matter of taste, and almost nobody will hold that line once it is put to them.

Why it does not get you outEven if moral claims only express feelings, feelings can still contradict each other, and showing someone that theirs do is exactly what the arguments here do. You can condemn kicking a dog and pay for a pig to be killed, but you cannot do both and claim the two attitudes fit together. Stevenson treated that pressure as the whole point of moral argument rather than an obstacle to it, and Simon Blackburn has spent a career showing that ordinary moral reasoning survives on this view.

The problemMoral words behave like ordinary ones. They work inside “if” sentences, they can be denied, and you can reason with them, which is hard to explain if they are only noises of approval. That objection, from Peter Geach and John Searle, is why most people in this tradition now hold a more careful version of it.

Error theory is the belief that moral claims really are meant as statements of fact, exactly as realism says, and that every one of them is false, because there are no moral facts for them to be about.

Compare claims about ghosts. People who talk about ghosts mean it seriously and are saying something that could in principle be true. There just are no ghosts, so everything they say about them is false. Mackie argued that moral claims are in the same position, from the sheer variety of moral codes across history and from the strangeness of the facts that would be needed to make them true.

For veganismIt arrives as “morality is made up anyway, so nothing is really wrong”, usually offered as a reason to carry on.

Where it landsIt is the most honest of the sceptical beliefs, and the only one that does not quietly help itself to moral commitments while denying them. But it dissolves everything, rather than giving permission for anything. It does not make farming animals acceptable. It empties the word “acceptable”. Nothing is permitted either, and nobody can be criticised for objecting to anything.

The problemAlmost nobody can live by it. Mackie spent the second half of his own book setting out how a morality might be built once the illusion is given up, which tells you how usable he found the conclusion by itself.

Two things are true of all five. None can be aimed at animal ethics in particular, because each one applies to every moral claim the person holds. And none removes the need to be consistent: even with no moral facts anywhere, your attitudes can contradict each other, and pointing that out is still a perfectly good move.

It is also worth noticing when the retreat happens. Someone who begins by arguing that animals do not suffer much, and ends by arguing that suffering is not really bad, has given up the first argument without saying so. That is not a reason to be smug about it. It is a reason not to follow them all the way down.

Most of the arguments on this site never need any of this. They fail on their own terms: they contradict themselves, or they rest on a claim that is simply false, or they describe what is natural and conclude something about what is right.

What the main ethical theories sayBrowse the arguments