Are there really objective moral values?
Many people think that beauty is subjective, that it is “in the eye of the beholder.” They would claim there are really no objective facts about what is and is not beautiful, only facts about what people prefer. Because of the close analogies between the moral and the aesthetic sense, parity of reasoning suggests that we should see the difference between right and wrong as also being merely in the eye of the beholder. Though ethical intuitionists insist on the analogy, they equally insist that the facts about right and wrong are perfectly objective. How can they have it both ways? Ethical intuitionists could respond by arguing that the moral-aesthetic analogy is merely used to illustrate the fact that not all senses are limited to the five physical senses. However, this doesn’t necessarily imply any further connection between the moral and aesthetic senses.
