so i was browsing through the moral relativity thread, and someone raised the question of a possible synthesis between the objective and subjective domains of morality, and it reminded me of an ethics paper i wrote a few years ago as an undergraduate.
this was written before my discovery of nietzsche, whose genius has since become far and away my most profound philosophical influence - and subsequently and more currently bernard williams as well, particularly in ethics
i was about to post it within that thread, but decided this antiquated little beast warrants its own, if only for its utter lack of brevity 
Continuum of Moral Consciousness
In attempting to explain morality and human action, I believe Hume and Nagel were onto something in their psychological conception of ethics, specifically as it relates to motivational theory. In explanations of moral action, while practical reason can certainly be useful, it can also insufficient and/or inapplicable, as in many extraordinary cases (e.g. heroism). Among the chief aims of psychological study is a better understanding of human motivation, behavior, and reasons for action – and though the moral sphere is peculiarly distinct, it seems natural to include it as perhaps a particular form or branch of psychology. Furthermore, the focus of its study is ultimately on exactly that which gives rise to the very subject of ethics – consciousness. Conscious awareness, though a fundamental and necessary property of all moral agents, is a functional process that has thus far eluded human definition and understanding – and, given its crucial role in moral deliberation and activity, it seems this gap in our understanding of consciousness would naturally carry over into ethical theory as well, if we are searching in the correct domain. My intent here is to sketch a psychological, humanistic theory of morality.
If it is the case that psychology is the most appropriate field with which to make progress in ethical theory, then it seems unavoidable but to propose a sort of metaphysical framework, for such an explanation will necessarily involve a degree of speculation, and a satisfactory definition of consciousness is likely something I will be unable to provide. Thus, my aim will simply be to sketch a description of what I intuitively understand to be universal components of human consciousness, and how they may interact and relate to each other in distinctly moral activity. From the outset, allow me to concede that my intuitive understanding of consciousness is exactly that, intuitive, and it certainly cannot be regarded as, nor is it intended to be taken as, anything of an asserted absolute. Nevertheless, I find this understanding to not only be plausible, but also fairly consistent with observable patterns in other human beings, as well as with the universe at-large. I shall attempt a brief explanation of why I believe this to be so.
Our understanding of psychology consists primarily on empirical observation and intuitive speculation with respect to patterns and tendencies in human behavior. We exist in a universe consisting in a seemingly perfect balance of inherent opposites; right and wrong, good and evil, positive and negative, male and female – the existence of one implies that of the other. Indeed, not even the particles of matter that constitute physical reality are without their opposite in antimatter. The necessity of mutual opposites appears to be a fundamental feature built into the very fabric of reality, and is also fundamental feature at the center of every ethical debate. Although consciousness appears unfathomably complex, and our understanding of the human mind is curiously limited, I find no compelling reason to suppose the mind is somehow distinct and exempt from this necessity of opposite that we find to be an otherwise pervasive pattern of the cosmos. Indeed, upon careful introspection, I discover what I believe to be two distinct and opposing constituents of the mind, and in observing others I suspect this to be universal feature of the human condition. I shall attempt to identify and distinguish these two components, and to elucidate their interaction in moral activity.
Being the case that we exist in this universe, are governed by its system of laws, and are physically comprised of the same particles of matter as everything else contained in it, it seems to follow that the universe itself is conscious, since we are cognizant of ourselves as being part of it. Thus, it seems reasonable to suppose that each agent is essentially the universe subjectively experiencing itself. If we accept that consciousness is somehow an objective feature of the cosmos, then consciousness itself must be objective to a degree, even in its manifestation in a particular agent. Let us also postulate, then, that there is an objective and universal component of consciousness that is shared collectively among all agents. Henceforth, we shall refer to this objective consciousness as simply awareness, and let us loosely define awareness as our pre-thought, objective perception of the external world shared by all sentient beings.
As a natural and evolutionary necessity, the mind also has a subjective, internally focused constituent, which we shall call the ego. The ego actually supervenes on awareness, and is entirely concerned with self-preservation and the agent’s personal interests, and allows the agent to distinguish itself from the external world. Every ego is unique to a particular agent, possessing its own unique biases, sentiments, beliefs, dispositions, and concerns, which are all largely shaped by experience. The thoughts and actions of every agent consist in the interaction between their subjective ego and their objective awareness. An agent’s awareness perceives objective information from the external world, and its ego interprets and subjectifies that information to a greater or lesser degree. The degree to which objectively perceived information is subjectified is in direct proportion to the strength of influence on the part of the ego. Egoic influence on an agent’s objective perception is largely an unconscious bias. The ego is like a delusion-generator of sorts, or a perceptive filter that retains information consistent with current beliefs, and rejects contradictory information. We can clearly see, I think, how this sort of paradigm may explain moral disagreement among agents, even if all available “facts” are agreed upon.
Say we have two agents debating the cause of an auto accident. Person A was stopped at a traffic light, and Person B approached quickly from behind. As the light was green for a few moments, B saw this and expected A to go through the light. Person B, expecting that A would go through the green light, decided to scroll through his iPod in search of his favorite Miles Davis song, and took his eyes off the road in the process. Low and behold, B fails to see that A is still stopped at the light, and collides into him. Each of them agrees on all the facts pertaining to the accident itself. Objectively, although A was still stopped at a green light, he was not at fault for the accident, as B ran into him when he should have been paying attention. Nevertheless, B is irate and argues relentlessly with A that it was his fault because the light was green and he didn’t go through. B refuses to acknowledge that he should have been looking at the road instead of looking for Miles Davis, and the argument persists for over an hour. This story is relevant for this reason: although B is clearly at fault here, his ego prevents his awareness from viewing the situation objectively. Instead, in order to protect his egoic pride from shame and embarrassment, he clings to the one small piece of irrelevant information that supports his deluded belief in being right. In general, we find a consistent pattern among humans that, regardless of the facts of the matter, the incessant need of being “right” often takes precedence in the face of even the most blatant and obvious reasons that support the contrary. The ego is our very own delusion generator – arrogant, and it hates to swallow its own pride. Let us now turn the discussion to relate these features of consciousness to moral thought.
Moral sensibilities appear to us as something deeply ingrained within our evolutionary makeup. Indeed, our disposition toward moral conduct has likely been an evolutionary necessity, playing a key role in our survival to the present. As such, I expect there to exist objective moral properties, and that moral sensibilities are present within every sentient being – perhaps as an inherent feature of conscious awareness and reason. I also expect that agents appearing defective in their moral reasoning and conduct are not so much lacking moral sensibilities, as Wiggins seems to suggest, rather their sensibilities are contingently overridden by particular sentiments, beliefs, emotions, prejudices, and passions – all of which are held by the ego, often unconsciously on the part of the agent. While the defective agent’s objective awareness is capable of detecting these objective moral properties, their subjective ego filters these properties from the perceived situation, very much like a delusion.
Defective people are not so much lacking moral sensibility, which we suppose is a universal feature of awareness, but rather such sensibility is often subjectively overridden by sentiments, beliefs, and prejudices held by their interpreting ego. To help elucidate this, let us conceive of morality as existing along a continuum, with objective awareness on one side, say to the left, and the subjective ego on the other (right). Let us call this the continuum of moral consciousness. The morality of an average person would lie right around the middle of this continuum, and such a person would be of average moral character, responding appropriately to average moral demands. The degree of authority to which normative and ethical demands actually have on a given agent is in direct proportion to their position along this continuum. As we move toward the right side of the continuum, moral interpretations become increasingly influenced by the self-centered ego, which in turn renders them more and more subjective and self-interested, and the agent essentially becomes decreasingly aware. At the extreme, moral sensibility and concern for others is nearly absent entirely from that individual, with their own desires and interests taking precedent over all else, regardless of the consequences. Indeed, upon reflective consideration of the nature of immorality, I believe we may find selfishness, in some form or another, as the chief motivator behind every putatively immoral act. Therefore, let us call an immoral act a selfish act, and define a selfish act as an act whose intention is to benefit or satisfy some desire of an agent, at the expense of some harm inflicted on another. We may say that in some sense, immorality is co-extensive with selfishness. Thus, in this view, a judgment internalist claim ‘I judge x to be wrong’ may be equated to ‘I judge x to be selfish.’ Desire and motivation in moral action is a topic to be discussed in greater depth a bit later.
On the other end, of course, we find exactly the opposite. As a moral system moves to the left, we find our moral sensibilities to be increasingly less influenced by the self-serving ego, and thus more and more objective. Furthermore, in concurrence with Nagel regarding moral sensibility, “recognition of the other person’s reality, and the possibility of putting yourself in his place, is essential” (Nagel, 83). I shall refer to this recognition as empathy – and just as we suppose moral sensibilities to be an inherent feature of objective awareness, empathy is an inherent and critical feature of these moral sensibilities. One’s sense of empathy is present to varying degrees along the continuum – suppressed and weakened by the ego on the right, and stronger and more ego-independent to the left. Furthermore, as we approach the far left of the continuum, we become increasingly selfless, and empathy evolves into the arousal of compassion and altruism. Thus, the greater the objective awareness of a moral agent, the more objective and selfless he becomes. An egoless agent would be very much similar to Firth’s notion of an ideal observer, being highly perceptive and unbiased. For these reasons, akin to the immoral case, we can say that in some sense morality is co-extensive with selflessness.
Let us now turn our discussion to ethical motivation, and why it is we may or may not choose to act in a moral situation based on this view. Depending on where an agent lies along the continuum, they will be more or less motivated in different ways – and though motivational desires of some sort are always present, they will differ dramatically depending on where the individual is consciously situated. An individual near the middle of the continuum, while they are generally empathetic enough to avoid intentionally causing harm to another, they are also not terribly motivated to act on the behalf of another either, especially if the risk or inconvenience of doing so is perceived to be rather high. Although, if the person happens to recognize that an act requiring little effort may help someone – say, by giving directions to a person on the street – they may find themselves motivated to do it, if only because they might feel good about it afterwards. As we begin moving along the right, an agent becomes less consciously aware and more deluded by their ego, and normative demands become less and less consequential. This would appear to make sense, for if one becomes increasingly concerned about their own desires, interests, and well-being, they will naturally become equally less so about the same in others. Therefore, for them, the only apparent reason for acting on behalf of another is if they too would somehow benefit from that act – they are motivated solely by their own desires and benefit. Towards the extreme, not only are the needs of others of negligible import, but the satisfaction of one’s own desires becomes so principally important that one has the willingness to whatever means necessary to see to those ends. For instance, if a relative of such a person owns an expensive painting that they desire, they would feel little or no compunction whatever about simply stealing it. They are motivated by the desire for a painting, and likewise are not restrained by any contrary desire or motive – say, a desire of being perceived as honest. In a more serious case, say an exceptionally depraved man’s girlfriend breaks up with him in favor of dating another man – he may be so consumed and deluded by ego-fed jealousy that he may decide to satisfy his desire to kill one or both of them out of vengeance, and further be able justify his action to himself in the process – because ‘they deserve it.’ His desire to murder then is motivated by his own anger, jealousy, and resentment, and the ‘fact’ that ‘they deserve it.’ Endless possibilities for such scenarios are present here, and it is a disturbing pattern we continually witness over time.
Motivational affairs are much more optimistic along the left side of the continuum, as we become increasingly aware objectively, and equally less influenced by the ego. I shall incorporate an internalist notion here, where the very sensibility which allows us to recognize a moral situation (awareness) at the same time motivates us to act in some way. As we become more aware, we are also able to place less importance on our own desires, especially unnecessary ones, and in turn become increasingly aware and attentive of the needs and desires of others. There we begin to find the necessary conditions for Nagel’s conception of altruism, including his metaphysical conception of oneself as a person among many others equally real. Indeed, in the extreme cases, we begin seeing individuals motivated to acts of moral heroism, even at great personal risk to themselves. Such behavior is motivated by the mere belief that a given action will somehow benefit or prevent harm to another, as the heroic person, through a genuine and robust sense of empathy, is able to perceive another and their needs as being equally real as his own. Thus, as a person becomes further and further removed from his ego, the same desires and motivations that would move him to act on his own behalf will begin to apply equally on behalf of another. This degree of ego-dissolution is witnessed most often between mothers and their children, or perhaps between genuine lovers. Practical reason can rarely account for such altruistic behavior.
What, though, of a situation in which a person acknowledges a moral dilemma that calls for action her part, yet fails to find her practical judgment efficacious enough to motivate her? Nagel explains, “The judgment that one has reason to do something includes the acceptance of a justification for doing it, and that this is its motivational content. However, such motivational content doesn’t necessarily imply motivational efficacy” (Nagel, 64). He says one can acknowledge a reason to act, yet choose not to do so for any number of reasons, of which he lists cowardice, laziness, panic, etc. Indeed, in considering the infinite number of reasons in which one may have moral reason to act, and yet lack the motivation to do so, I believe we can ultimately trace any one of them back to our selfish ego. If one fails to act because he panicked or is afraid, his inaction is selfish – though understandably so if the situational demands are extraordinarily ominous. If one fails to act because he is lazy, he failed to act in his own self-interest of doing nothing. I am unaware of many exceptions to this, as one either is or is not willing to respond to ethical demands based entirely on one’s regard for the self. That is not to say a person is always blameworthy for selfish inaction, or that there aren’t exceptions in which a person would be justified in failing to act. For instance, a mother of two children should not be expected to risk her life to save that of a stranger, as of course, there are reasonable and unreasonable moral demands. Nevertheless, failure to act on a moral demand is itself a selfish act, and is blameworthy under normal circumstances.
A number of philosophers, including Wiggins and Gibbard, describe ethics within an evolutionary framework in which our moral sensibilities gradually improve over time. For instance, Wiggins describes property-response pairings of the form <p, r>, where p is an objective moral property, and r is a subjective response to that property. Through something resembling trial and error, agents improve over time at eliciting in themselves the appropriate subjective responses to particular objective properties, becoming increasingly objective themselves. The factual views of Railton and Boyd are similar in the sense that they argue for factual features of the moral world that agents learn to track – and, also through a sort of trial and error method, improve in this tracking over time. The view presented here would explain such pairings as Wiggins describes by the agent’s moral position along the continuum, where the agent’s capacity to match a given moral property with the appropriate response will depend on his level of objective awareness. In Railton’s view, an agent’s ability to track moral facts would, again, be proportional to how objectively aware that agent is. Likewise, in this view, the natural evolutionary progression would be that humans slowly move further and further away from the ego, and evolve to become increasingly aware and morally conscious. The fact that we no longer allow slavery, and allow African Americans to attend college is exemplifies such progress. Furthermore, it seems plausible that such increases in conscious awareness, over time through trial and error, would be the natural progression of our evolutionary development.
Nagel, Thomas – The Possibility of Altruism
Wiggins, David – A Sensible Subjectivism