Morality and Subjective Value

A blog post I commented on the other day has sparked some thought on my own system of moral and ethical values. Mine doesn't rely on interpersonal value comparisons. The social nature of assigning blame and credit makes it so that there is a harmony of interests in this regard. When we assign blame and credit we are attempting to alter someone's reputation. In general, our attempt will only be successful if this is done according to some principle. The action that causes us to make the assignment must be one of a certain class of behaviors that will have the tendency to harm others. The principle must gain widespread acceptance.

But what can we say about moral and ethical values if all values are subjective and we can only assign ordinal numbers to them. That is values will have the form of a rank order of preferences. Clearly there will be some rank order of people that you would like to spend time with. You will value time spent with one person above time spent with another. Suppose that it comes to your attention that two individuals have committed two different actions, call them A and B. If this would cause you to reverse your preferences in favor of the one who performed action A, then we can say that you consider A to be better than B.

However, this sort of statement might not indicate a moral preference. There are many things that would cause you to prefer the company of one person over that of another, some of which have nothing to do with morality. How do we tell the difference? There might be some circumstances in which you would prefer the company of someone with worse morals. Remember the Pink Floyd song that has the line "I need a dirty woman."

I have argued that sexual promiscuity has the potential to harm others. This is because when you enter into that type of relationship with someone you are not well acquainted with, you run the risk of inadvertently encouraging infidelity. By moral and ethical values we are interested in factors that would make you not want to associate with someone that are based on universal and general principles. For instance a common interest in a certain sport might make association with someone more pleasant, but since others might not share that common interest this isn't a matter of moral and ethical values.

A man might value sexual promiscuity if he were looking for a short-term relationship, but for a woman to acquire a reputation for that sort of conduct would be destructive to any other kind of relationship.  Sometimes it is not quite so destructive for a man.  This is because women will be somewhat interested in the quality of a man's genes.  If a man has a well deserved reputation for having many sexual partners, there is the upside that he has genes that lead to that.  Such a trait has a potential to increase the number of offspring that his descendants might have.

All this is quite troubling.  It is very difficult to support a system of moral and ethical values that treats men and women differently.  It would fail to be universal.  There is something unfair about it.  On the other hand, it will be very difficult to get people to treat male and female sexuality the same way.  I suspect this will continue to be a problem.

In any case, we can say that in spite of the fact that many men value the interactions that they have with loose women, they are likely to blame them for being loose in any case.  Their attitudes are likely to change with their mental states.  This makes sexual morality far more complicated than other forms.

If we leave sexual morality aside, it might very well be the case that other forms of morality are far more simple.  People will prefer interaction with those who have better morals.  This is also likely to be the case in more long term sexual relationships.  With all these relationships the rank ordering of preference for interaction with people will lead to a rank ordering of abstract descriptions of actions under a system of moral and ethical values.