Some people believe that morality is a private matter and therefore their motive for living morally is for their own personal interests. For this to be true then they must also believe that morality is subjective because for morality to be private then each individual must have their own moral opinions. The people that argue morality is a private matter claim that, “no one can know what is right for others, so no one can condemn others.” However taking the line that morality is a private matter is effectively isolating individuals and the counter argument to this line of thinking is that our interests are connected to other peoples’ lives. We are born from our parents and we are as a result not likely to have completely private moral thoughts, and therefore we are not private but public individuals, e.g. If there is an old woman being mugged by a thief, and you decided not to intervene because you felt that morality was a private matter and therefore it was not in your place to interfere, you would actually be making as public an action by not intervening as you would by intervening. This is because by you not helping there has been a public consequence, the woman being mugged. This is known as negligence and in England you can be arrested for an action such as this. Now that I have shown the morality cannot be a completely private matter, it does not prove that subjective morality is wrong. It merely shows that the argument for subjective morality cannot be supported by the argument that morality is a private matter.
A stronger argument for subjective morality however, is that if moral values differ between cultures it would seem that these values cannot be objective, because if they were, then the whole world should share the exact same values as each other and as this is not the case we are led to believe that they are subjective. However the counter argument to this is that even though moral values seem to differ on the surface, the underlying, key morals do not differ such as murder and rape being looked down upon, e.g. If you asked people from different parts of the world who was a better person, Hitler or Gandhi, nearly everyone would answer Gandhi. This shows that people understand and share similar views that saving lives is better than killing. Infact it could be said that it is just the culture or customs that differ and not the moral values. If we take this line of thinking then one could argue strongly that there are universal rights and wrongs and therefore morality must be objective.
Going back to an argument that a believer in subjective morality might give is that when a baby is born, they are born without any knowledge of right and wrong, good and bad, and therefore they have no moral values. If this is true then the moral values they have later on in life must have been taught to them or obtained by their experiences and interaction with their surroundings. This seems a very likely possibility because it fits in with the way that a person will share similar moral values as the other people in their society and culture. Due to our lack of scientific knowledge however we are not capable of knowing whether babies can think morally and if they are born with an instinct for example to not kill, maybe they are not able to express themselves at such a young age. Therefore from this evidence one could use this as an argument for subjective morality but there would always be an element of doubt.
To conclude, my personal opinion on the question “Are moral values objective or subjective?” is that morality is subjective. I have come to this conclusion because I think that moral values are too varied around the world. This is clearly evident when you look at murderous regimes such as Iraq where mass murder is not looked down upon, whereas if this activity occurred in America there would be great controversy. The war against terrorism could be seen as a war of morality where America believes that terrorist states are “wrong” and “bad”. Therefore if morality was to be objective then there should not be this inconsistency in values and that is why morality must be subjective, and under current scientific evidence I can back this up further by the fact that babies are not born with a set of standard morals, as they grow up they learn their values through their emotions and experiences.