Introduction to EthicsLecture 7

Mackie & Moral Skepticism

By David Kelsey

Mackie’s conclusion

• Mackie’s conclusion is that there are no objective values.– Values are not part of the fabric of the world

– Includes moral and non-moral values

• Mackie’s view is:– Second order. His view is about how moral values fit into our world. He claims they

don’t.

– His view is not a first order moral view.• He isn’t rejecting a particular morality.

Mackie isn’t a subjectivist

• Mackie isn’t a subjectivist:– Mackie think Subjectivists claim ‘This action is right’ means ‘I approve of this action’.

So moral judgments are reports of the speaker’s feelings…

• What Mackie thinks:– His view is a negative one: it says what there isn’t not what there is. Mackie says

objective values don’t exist.

– An ontological thesis, not a linguistic or conceptual one. This isn’t a view about the meaning of moral statements. His view is one about existence. Namely about the non-existence of values.

An error theory

• Mackie’s theory is an error theory:– Mackie thinks we talk as if there are objective values.

• Ordinary moral judgments include a claim to objectivity.

• This is seen in ordinary talk of morality but also in theoretical talk of morality.

• So Mackie is claiming that the objectivity of values is part of what our moral judgments mean.

– But Mackie argues that there aren’t any such objective values.– So Mackie’s view is an error theory. Although we talk as if there are

objective values we are in error…– “although most people in making moral judgments implicitly claim…to be

pointing to something objectively prescriptive, these claims are all false.” (544-5)

The Argument from Relativity

• The argument from relativity:• 1. Moral codes vary from one society to another and from one period to another.• 2. Moral beliefs vary widely between different individuals, groups and classes

within society.• Thus, 3. There are no objective values.

• Note:– It is not mere disagreement that tells against objective values.

– Instead, disagreement about morality reflects participation in a different way of life.

– If we approve of monogamy it is because we live that way…

In reply to the argument from Relativity

• Mackie considers an objection:– Some say in response that there are some very basic principles that are at least

nearly universal and so would count as objective values.• For example, the principle of utility...

– But combine these general principles with the specific circumstances of a society and you get the more specific moral codes that arise there.

• In response:– Mackie claims “’Moral sense’ or ‘intuition’ is an initially more plausible description of

what supplies many of our basic moral judgments than ‘reason.’” (546)

– So in making a moral judgment we don’t appeal to some general principle…

– Instead, we make those specific judgments because something about the particular situation incites and arouses certain responses immediately in a person though they could arouse “radically and irresolvably different responses in others.” (546)

The Argument from Queerness

• The argument has 2 parts, one metaphysical and one epistemological.

• The metaphysical complaint:– 1. “If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of

a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.” (546)• If they were real, values would have to be “intrinsically action-guiding and motivating.”• Values are said to have prescriptivity built in. To-do-ness is in the values themselves. But this

is like nothing else in the universe…

– 2. The link between value and fact is utterly unique as well:• Think also about values and how they relate to the natural features upon which they are found.• Take an act of deliberate cruelty: what is the link between it being such an act and it ’s being

wrong. Some causal link or a relation of supervenience or maybe an entailment of some kind. Just what the link is, is difficult to see…

The epistemological complaint

• The epistemological complaint:– If we were aware of values “it would have to be by some special faculty of moral perception or

intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else.” (546)– We couldn’t be aware of values by way of any other mode of sense perception, or of scientific

reasoning, or of conceptual analysis, etc.– Consider an act of cruelty. To see this as wrong, some intutive faculty “must be postulated which

can see at once the natural features that constitute the cruelty, and the wrongness, and the mysterious consequential link between the two.”

• In response:– one can claim that we appeal to intuition to solve disputes about other concepts such as essence or

number or space and time or of causation or of necessity.– We might claim that there is within us a faculty for discerning such truths just as with the faculty of

moral intuition.

• Mackie’s reply:– We need an account of how we arrive at truths and knowledge in such areas as essence, number,

space and time, etc.

Explaining objectification

• Mackie ends the paper with an explanation of why we objectify values given there aren’t any objective values.

• His reasons:– The objectification of moral values arises from the projection or objectification of moral

attitudes. We read our feelings into their objects.

– And society puts pressure on its members to see and hold the same values.

– And we have reasons for objectifying values: it helps regulate communication and behavior.

– Lastly, when we desire something we tend to then objectify it as valuable in some sense.

• That something is good depends upon our desiring it, not the other way around.