It seems to me that objective morality is incoherent and non-sensical. We, as Austrians, should realize (and I think Clatyon established this) that all valuation is subjective. Values are related between an object/action and its perceived utility, so it is necessarily mind-dependent, not mind-independent (Mackie’s Argument from Queerness, basically no value is “inherent” in anything). This reminds me of a Shakespeare quote: “Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Okay, we’ve established that value is determined subjectively, now what makes it “morality”? One of the key classical features of morality is that it applies to everyone everywhere. If it doesn’t do that, then why call it morality?
The thing I don’t get about ethical subjectivists is that when you reduce ethics to the individual, why not just call them individual preferences? Of course they could hypothetically be both a preference and moral at the same time, but I see no need for the moral attachment. The problem is that they still want to hang on to right and wrong. The thing with moral nihilists is that they are just as nihilistic towards morality as they are with objective taste standards. They don’t deny taste and they don’t deny beneficial social behavior, they just deny that one ought to perform a certain social behavior and I tend to agree with that sentiment, since there is no basis in reality for an objective reason to do anything.
However, like I said, this doesn’t negate valuation and since we all share many of the same values, it’s something like morality. We can still argue about what we as society want in a way that is rational, but if you’re looking for that pie-in-the-sky objective morality, you won’t find it. I tend to think that might makes right as well. If you take psychological egoism on its face (which is another topic altogether) any action we take is inherently the action we want, thus it is to some degree selfish. So the action we take is dependent on our brain states and physiology, so to tell us that we ought to do something else is a pretty demanding claim.
Another point to make is how do we know what is truly right or truly wrong? There is a looming epistemological issue here. If we’re limited by our perspective and different cultures share many different, ritualistic values, then I don’t see how there is a lot of common ground to work with. Any society to have advanced this far obviously doesn’t support killing, lying, etc. so I’m not talking about those. But I’m talking about the sorts of stuff like caning in Singapore. The people who enforce that have been conditioned to believe caning is a fair punishment while we in the West view it as somewhat barbaric. How do you know it is not us who have been “brainwashed”? Basically morality is just a social control. Whatever gets a society to not harm itself in the long run will be effective, even if they have differing standards of justice.
Even saying all of this, assuming we share equal values, discourse on how to go about actualizing these values does not disappear overnight or anything. We can still have the debates about government intervention and all of that, just realizing that we are arguing for the maximization of subjective utility for the most members possible (because for whatever reason, that’s what we value). You can still make arguments from the self-ownership axiom because while ownership is also decided subjectively, most people will assume that we own ourselves and that we can work from there. So Rothbard was onto something, he was just reaching for objectivity. Of course every Marxist thinks that collectives are fulfilling and moral while libertarians think fending for yourself is. It’s what the individuals want disguised and sugar-coated to make it look like one system is dominant over another and to try to influence you into thinking like they do. Not that I have a problem with it, it just is what it is.