On choosing to be good

Before taking a course on ethics, I was a subjectivist. I've mentioned a while back¹ that I found the idea of objective morality unconvincing: [[ Puritanically good ]] About halfway through the semester we talked about subjectivism. Unfortunately I don't remember the name of the article, but the author's position was that subjectivism was meaningless as an ethical philosophy. If subjectivism is true, then everything can be moral, and nothing can be moral. It shouldn't be of any interest to moral philosophers because it isn't useful. The value of ethics is to come up with a way to figure out what's morally good in general. They extended this thinking to cultural relativism, which is the idea that morality differs between cultures. They argued this belief was a form of subjectivism because there's no smallest society that can have its own distinct morality.² Of course, that doesn't mean you have to be racist to be moral, because if you think about it for more than five seconds, it's…