Bishop Barron recently put out a video on the suffocating quality of subjectivism:

He’s entirely correct that one of the problems with subjectivism is that without objective value, people cannot talk to each other, they can only ignore each other or try to subjugate each other by force. It is only by appeal to transcendent truths to which human beings are morally bound to conform themselves is it possible to try to persuade someone (because persuasion is by pointing to the transcendent truths, upon the perception of which the other will voluntarily conform himself because it is the right thing to do).

In practice, though, Subjectivists never mean it. Once they have convinced someone else of subjectivism and thereby gotten the person to stop trying to persuade anyone, the very next move is always to try to smuggle objectivism in again, but only as available to the original Subjectivist.

The normal technique for trying to smuggle objectivism back is through innovations in language. You may not call art good or bad, because that is implying objective evaluation of it. But you can call it subversive or conventional, which are objective, despite just meaning good or bad. You cannot say that a person wearing immodest clothing in public is bad. That’s horribly patriarchical and body-shaming of you. You are free, however, to call it problematic.

The technique is always the same, because it has to be. First there is a move to shut down all criticism that a person doesn’t like by universally disallowing criticism. Once that is achieved, criticism becomes re-allowed using different language, which initially only lends itself to criticizing whatever the putative Subjectivist wants to criticize.

The Subjectivist’s victory tends to be short-lived, though. Semantic drift inevitably sets in. Whatever new word the Subjectivist has introduced in order to have a monopoly on the right to criticize quickly becomes adapted to all criticism and the Subjectivist is back to seeing criticized the things he was trying to protect. If he still has the energy for it—after a certain age, criticism tends to sting less—this begins another cycle of subjectivism.