What objectivity in ethics is depends, in part, on what ethics is. On the narrowest understanding, ethics consists in judgments about moral constraints, which govern a person's treatment of other people, as such. On the broadest understanding, ethics includes all normative judgments, which say which responses one ought to have, and all evaluative judgments, which assess people and things against standards, as good or bad, beautiful or ugly, and so on. While it may seem strained to interpret "ethics" so broadly, many of the questions about the objectivity of ethics in the narrow sense apply to normative and evaluative judgments in general.

In one sense, what is objective is what is so independently of one's particular attitudes or position. But this idea can be specified in different ways. In one sense, a particular ethical judgment is objective if and only if it is correct...