An Argument for Objective Morality Grounded in Conscious Experience
Introduction
Is morality fundamentally subjective, rooted in evolutionary instinct and cultural convention? Or can it be grounded in something deeper and more universal? In this essay, I argue that morality is not arbitrary nor merely human-made. Rather, it is an objective feature of reality—anchored in the structure of conscious experience itself.
Core Concepts
Consciousness: the experience of something itself. Anything that experiences anything is a consciousness.
Objectivity: choices or conclusions purely based on rationality. Not biased or directly affected by emotions.
Rationality: purely based on logic.
Reality: everything that exists in any way. In any dimension, time, space or outside of those etc.
Morality from Nature
The experience of morality shaped by evolution is primarily aimed at reproduction and survival. It is not the kind of source we can rely on for defining what is actually moral. Evolution is not built from fundamental principles following planned goals, but follows mechanisms that produce certain adaptive capacities over time.
Who or What is Relevant
Putting humans at the center of a moral system is flawed. My view of objective morality values all experience in reality that can be either positive or negative. Anything capable of conscious experience—human, mouse, alien, computer, god, or otherwise—is morally relevant. That they are different species is not the reason they matter differently; only their capacity for conscious experience matters.
Human Well-Being Is Not Enough
Human well-being is far from the only relevant factor. Limiting morality to that would be egoistic. Everything that can experience some form of positive or negative reality in any context—time, space, or beyond—is morally relevant.
It is often said that because human well-being involves feelings and preferences, it is subjective. But that’s like saying rational conclusions that use emotional information are themselves subjective.
If a conclusion is directly biased or distorted by emotion, then it is subjective. But if emotion is simply used as data within a rational framework, the conclusion can still be objective.
Appeal to Emotion vs Rational Evaluation
For example, arguing that eating meat is morally wrong because animals suffer in the process is not an appeal to emotion—it’s an appeal to facts about conscious experience. The suffering is the morally relevant information; using it to draw a rational conclusion is objective.
Calling this “appeal to emotion” is a misunderstanding of what rationality entails.
Truth vs Utility
Arguments that subjective morality produces beneficial outcomes are irrelevant to whether it is true. That’s like arguing God must exist because belief in him has benefits.
The truth of morality depends on what is, not what feels comfortable or useful. In fact, objective morality, if discovered and followed, would produce better long-term outcomes for all conscious experience—not because it’s subjective, but because it aligns with reality.
Treating Everyone Equally—Misunderstood
It is incorrect to assume that if everyone counts equally, we must treat everyone identically. Equal value does not mean identical treatment. Morally right behavior is that which best serves everyone, directly or indirectly, depending on context.
Treating everyone the same in every situation might produce worse consequences overall. Even if individuals have equal value, different roles, responsibilities, and relationships require different treatment to achieve the best result.
Humans are not the whole picture, nor should we be the moral center.
Predators and Prey
Some argue that applying objective morality across species leads to contradictions—what about predators and prey?
The key is to zoom out: what matters is the total conscious experience involved, not isolated pain or pleasure. Prey suffering may seem wrong in isolation, but ecosystems often depend on predator-prey dynamics. A rational moral system would evaluate whether interfering improves the total experience—or destabilizes it and causes more suffering.
Objective morality doesn’t require us to act immediately in every case, but to understand what leads to the best overall state of experience.
God as Moral Authority
Even if one bases morality on God, it remains arbitrary unless God’s views themselves are grounded in something beyond preference or power. Appealing to God’s nature or commands simply defers the question—it doesn’t resolve it.
The Real Problem: Undefined Morality
Much of the confusion in moral debates comes from undefined terms. “Right” and “wrong” are often used without clear definitions. Discussions about morality often reduce to disagreements over the definition of morality itself.
This creates circular reasoning: we use words like “should” and “ought” without knowing what they mean. Before answering what is moral, we must ask: what is best? And then: what does best even mean?
The Objective Nature of Experience
To find out if morality can be objective, we must ask whether experiences themselves have objective properties. I argue they do.
I know from first-person experience that pain is something I want to avoid. It has the quality of being negative. Likewise, pleasure has the quality of being positive. I cannot fully describe these properties, but I know they exist.
Even if we cannot reduce these qualities further or define them completely, their existence is undeniable to anyone who has experienced them.
We always choose pleasure over pain, and neutrality over suffering. This reveals something objective about the structure of experience. [✱]
Reducing Reality to Conscious Experience
Everything in reality falls into one of two categories: things that have conscious experience, and things that do not.
Only the first category matters morally. Non-conscious entities are morally irrelevant by definition, because nothing is at stake. Therefore, the best state of reality is the one in which conscious beings experience the most positive and least negative states, considering both intensity and duration.
This leads naturally to an objective moral principle:
Maximize positive conscious experience. Minimize negative conscious experience.
Responsibility and Right Action
Anyone with the capacity to affect outcomes carries moral responsibility. The action that leads to the best total outcome—given all known information—is the objectively right action.
Right and wrong are not binary. Often, one action is better than another, but worse than a third. The goal is not perfection, but movement toward the best total state of experience.
Self-Sacrifice and Balance
This does not mean one must neglect oneself for others. Your needs are part of reality too. Often, the most effective way to improve the world is to start with the area you control most—your own life.
That said, in rare cases, the moral action might involve personal sacrifice for the greater good. That would not make the system cruel, but honest. It reveals how deeply interconnected we are, and how real responsibility is.
Conclusion
Objective morality can be grounded in the structure of conscious experience. Suffering and joy are not equal, not neutral, and not interchangeable. Power brings responsibility, and reason brings clarity. The moral path is the one that moves reality toward more positive conscious experience and away from the negative.
Let me know if you spot any flaws, questions, or areas for improvement.
Sorry, could you please just formalize the argument for objective morality because while not everything you say is false, I don’t see how any of it logically leads to moral objectivism as used within the context of moral philosophy.
You haven’t addressed the is-ought gap at all. If there is an objective morality, I’d challenge you to make a moral judgement as an example that logically follows from purely descriptive premises (this is generally considered to be impossible.)
The only thing I can think of that you could do is maybe re-define objective (within the context of moral philosophy) to try to sneak it in there, but that’s all that’ll really be. It’s just logically possible for truly normative (prescriptive) conclusions to be objective, this is something that’s been known for hundreds of years.
I second Hay’s suggestion of making a more formal argument. The unstructured sections of this post made it unclear which propositions you took to support which.
I’d also note that your definition of “objectivity” at the beginning makes it trivially true that morality is sometimes subjective, since people are surely at least sometimes biased by their emotions when discussing morality.
An alternative definition of “objectivity” that is pretty standard within meta-ethics goes something like this: X is objective if it is not constitutively dependent on the attitudes/reactions of observers. The funniness of a comedian is subjective because it is constituted by how amused the comedian makes people feel. In contrast, the solidity of a table is objective because it does not depend on anyone’s reactions.
Thank you very much for the post that addresses the question of “objective morality.”
Certain moral and altruistic behaviors have been observed in non-human animals, all of them related, naturally, to the survival of the species as a social community of shared interests.
But human beings have a cultural capacity to develop morality… also emotionally.
Regarding about eating meat, there is abundant testimony from people from vegetarian cultures (for example, Hindus) who feel a terrible repugnance to eating meat (because it goes against a religious mandate). There is no reason why cultural strategies cannot achieve the same effect based on non-religious principles.
The philosopher of religion Loyal Rue believes that religion can be considered to consist of “educating the emotions.”
Therefore, it may be useful to figure out what “objective morality” is, but we are cultural animals, and we can create an emotionally effective morality simply by organizing socially viable psychological strategies based on rationally constructed moral principles.
Of course, the scope of effectiveness of these strategies is limited. We cannot create moral emotional reactions based on principles, for example, of purchasing consumer goods (as marketers would like), but a political adherence internalized as “communist morality” has indeed been achieved to a certain extent in Marxist regimes.
For those of us who believe in altruism, it is feasible to attempt to achieve an internalized morality based on rationally constructed altruistic principles comparable to traditional “Christian saintliiness.”