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Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Pelican)

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The first chapter of Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong is the locus classicus for error theories in contemporary meta-ethics. There he argues that ordinary moral discourse and thought involve an assumption that there are what he calls "objective values," and that this assumption is false. Consequently, ordinary moral thought and language are infected by an error that precludes any ordinary moral claims and thoughts from being true.

Mackie first argues for a cognitivist interpretation of moral language. In other words, he argues that ordinary moral claims purport to describe facts about the world. In particular, ordinary moral language and thought purport to describe facts about objective moral values. What are objective moral values? They have two defining characteristics: (i) mind-independent existence (think of how chairs, trees, people, and electrons exist), and (ii) "intrinsic and categorical prescriptivity": that is, they are such that the mere apprehension of them will motivate a person to act in a certain way. The former characteristic is the source of their objectivity; the latter is the source of their normativity.

But, he claims, we have good reason to think that no such things exist. Mackie's fundamental worry about these putative objective values is that these things are especially "queer," that they are unlike any other things we have good reason to think exist. As I understand Mackie, underlying his worries about the queerness of these putative entities is his perception of a tension in their nature. He appears to believe that the objectivity of these putative entities is in tension with their intrinsic and categorical action-guidingness. That is, it is unclear to Mackie how something that exists as a mind-independent part of reality could have the sort of influence on human behavior that these objective values are supposed to have. It is unclear how something could be both objective and normative. The things that scientists study and that we encounter in the everyday world simply don't have this sort of categorical action-guidingness built into them. So, given the naturalistic conception of the world that Mackie favors, we have good a posteriori reasons to doubt the existence of objective moral values.

But, if Mackie is correct about the nature of ordinary moral thought and language, this commits us to regarding ordinary moral thought and language as involving a very fundamental sort of error, an error of presupposing that objective moral values exist. Mackie then completes his error theory by providing an explanation of our tendency to make this error, to mistakenly suppose that ordinary moral thought and language involve our successfully coming to know about the sorts of things he claims don't exist.

Mackie's book doesn't end here, however. Indeed, this is only the first chapter, and Mackie goes on to cover a wide range of territory in normative ethics and meta-ethics, along with a few issues in metaphysics (the existence of God and freedom of the will) that have some bearing on moral issues. In fact, despite his worries about the objectivity of morality, Mackie goes on to defend a substitute for morality, one that looks quite a bit like a broadly consequentialist moral theory, and he even weighs in on several controversial moral issues that are still with us. In short, in a little over two hundred pages of exceptionally clear prose, Mackie covers just about everything of interest in moral philosophy.

This book is, of course, essential reading for anyone interested in meta-ethics. Understanding some of the material and its importance may require some background knowledge, but enough of the book is more generally accessible that it also constitutes a good wide-ranging introduction to issues in both meta-ethics and normative ethics for a person with some background in philosophy (and perhaps for the general reader). Furthermore, the book, while not a work of history, is sufficiently informed about the history of the issues it discusses to provide the reader with an entry into study of the history of the subject.

If you're especially interested in Mackie's meta-ethical views, you should attempt to track down a copy of Morality and Objectivity (Ted Honderich, ed.), as it includes interesting and important reactions to Mackie's views by some major names (John McDowell, Simon Blackburn, R. M. Hare, Bernard Williams, et al.) in moral philosophy.

It might be read as an introduction to Ethics, but it isn't one. It is rather one of the most important works in 20th century ethics.

Mackie's book was revolutionary since being the first one to combine anti-realism (no objectively prescriptive values in the world) with cognitivism (the meaning of ethical statements can be true or false). Most of the previous anti-realists were anti-realists mostly implicitly, only because of being non-cognitivsts. Mackie has a different view which in my opinion is much more closer to the truth. The book also contains his error theory (people have a disposition to see their value judgments as objective). While the reviewer cdtreyer as the mainstream tradition have concentrated on Mackie's error theory I think it is much less important than the denial of the objective values and the justification of the role of morality in quasi-contractual terms.

Mackie's views on positive morality are justified by quasi-contractual (he discusses Plato's Protagoras, Hobbes and Hume) means and would combine very well with evolutionary perspectives. The discussion on the content of normative views is just a brief sketch, but this isn't really what this book is about anyway. Anyone who claims that the contents of the first part of the book undermine the contents of the second should read chapter 5 again and again and again. That there are no objective values in the world does not mean that there can't be right or wrong - it simply must be (or rather already has largely been) invented and constructed.

If you are interested in ethics you simply need to read this small, but important book which, while not being an introduction is still quite simple and very elegantly written. Besides the main content you will also get to read a great discussion on the meaning of the good (in debate with the classical Geach-Hare discussion found in Philippa Foot's "Theories of Ethics"), discussion on the is-ought problem and its flawed Searlean solution (also found in Foots collection), a chapter on univerzalisability of moral judgments (contra Hare) and on the frontiers of ethics: voluntary actions, determinism, law, politics, religion.

Mackie wants to convince us that objective values are not "part of the fabric of the universe." In other words, there are no moral claims that are objectively true, and no moral rules that are objectively binding on us. He gives three arguments in support of this claim. He argues that the best explanation for the diversity of ethical beliefs is that there is no matter of fact that some of us are getting right, while others are getting it wrong. He argues that the very existence of objective values is "queer" (by which he means "weird"), because they would have to have some strange sort of "intrinsic prescriptivity." And he argues that knowledge of objective values, if there were any, would require some strange, inexplicable form of moral intuition.

I personally am unconvinced by Mackie's arguments. For example, why should our ethical disagreements lead us to believe that there are no ethical facts? People disagree about lots of things that are objective if anything is (e.g., whether UFO's are space aliens). However, this is clearly one of the paradigmatic statements and defenses of "moral anti-realism."

For an alternative perspective to Mackie's, one might read Thomas Nagel's _The View from Nowhere_ (especially the chapters on ethics and value), or Alasdair MacIntyre's _After Virtue_.

Not only was this book enlightening on the topic of ethics, but (unlike many philosophy studies) it was interesting and easy to understand! Mackie's writing style is straight forward and his thoughts and descriptions are ingenious. No wonder this is not the first printing of this book! I was particularly impressed with his definition of the attributive adjective 'good' and the manner in which he distinguished the common term 'good' from the moral term 'good'. Also excellent is his discussion of 'ought' concerning Hume's Law. The only reason I give this book a rating of four stars (as opposed to five) is that, in philosophy, there is always a better theory yet to be published. I strongly recommend this book.

This is a well written, entertaining book. I did not find the arguments in the early part of the book on error theory and the "queerness" of object values convincing, but I do believe that different people have different values, which opens the door for a subjective moral philosophy. At this point, the book does an excellent job in developing and building the ideas behind just such a philosophy. This is the closest to "Humean" moral thought written in the 20th century that I have found (which I consider to be high praise).

I don't accept Mackie's so-called "error theory" that has as its consequence that all moral statements come out false and that we are globally and systematically mistaken in our everyday moral discourse (hence the name of the theory). There is, however, much more to this book - some of which I think is actually in tension with the error theory. There is, for example, the famous "argument from queerness" that deserves serious attention and there are some very interesting (although somewhat dated) discussions of universalization, game theory analysis and more. If I were to write a book on the same topic(s), it would probably not be too unlike this one.

Fritz- Anton Fritzson
Lund University,
Sweden

This book is regarded as the classic statement of moral error theory - the idea that there are no objective moral values. For this reason, anyone seriously interested in moral philosophy must grapple with this book. But the important part of the discussion, the attempted refutation of moral realism, only occupies a single chapter of the book. As such, it's not entirely satisfying. Mackie marshals two arguments in favor of his position, the arguments from relativity and from queerness. While I won't go into detail on either, the first seems flatly wrong and the second does not work against the Aristotelian position Mackie considers. And notably, Mackie does not claim it does either.

Much of the rest of the book is devoted to expounding his subjective theory of moral rightness. I found it somewhat interesting (he decries factory farming way back in 1977!), but philosophically, I was unsure of its value. I'm not sure how we actually argue for moral principles, if we grant Mackie's metaethics. An argument that is, in principle, not rationally resolvable seems not like one a philosopher qua philosopher should take part.

Roger Scruton says that J.L. Mackie's "Ethics" is "phenomenally overrated." Scruton, as usual, may have overstated his point, but I didn't like the book either.

Students and potential buyers should know that "Ethics" is NOT an introduction to ethics. Rather, it plunges the reader into the middle of often-pedantic analytic debates circa 1970, before thinkers such as Rawls, Singer and Finnis had resurrected ethical philosophy as a meaningful guide to action. Mackie rejected the idea of "objective" morality, whether theistic or utilitarian. For him, ethics was little more than applied psychology with a dash of conceptual analysis. It did not bind persons or tell us how to live well. All it did was solve "prisoners' dilemmas" and suggest ways to curb extreme kinds of selfishness that could destabilize society.

The first part of "Ethics" is still worthwhile (if only as a demolition job) for readers interested in meta-ethics. However, the book's fundamental shallowness is exposed as soon as it takes up concrete "first order" moral problems. Here, Mackie skates from issue to issue, considering none in detail. A total of three paragraphs is devoted to abortion. His proposal to kill "defective" newborns is advanced and defended in literally two sentences. The reader reels from the brevity, superficiality and arrogance of the discussions.

Bottomline: The student looking for an introduction to ethics would be shortchanged by Mackie's failure to consider schools such as Kantianism, virtue theory, or Thomist natural law. However, more advanced readers might appreciate his discussion of particular meta-ethical issues. Personally, I thought the book was a waste of time.

J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Penguin 1977.

Some thinkers hold that moral principles can be deduced from reason and introspection, while others hold that moral principles can be deduced from a careful examination of the varieties of human behavior observed across space and through time. The first might be called "objectivists" because moral principles, like mathematical principles, for these thinkers, are "out there" to be discovered. The second, by contrast, might be called "behaviorists" because they consider moral truths to be discovered in about the same way as we discover linguistic regularities: by observing how and when groups taken certain moral principles to be true, and by analyzing the commonalities and differences in the conception of morality in different societies. They may also be termed "evolutionary" because they invariably explain the commonalities and differences in moral principles in terms of the gene-culture coevolutionary process that lies at the basis of our development as a species.

There is no doubt in my mind but that the objectivists in the above sense are profoundly misled and misleading, and the behaviorists approach the study of morality correctly. In my view it is obvious that ethics should be studied scientifically, and those who propose to justify moral principles through Introspection or Reason are on the wrong track. Because most moral philosophers resoundingly reject my behaviorist/evolutionary position (the recently deceased Philippa Foote and the American David Chan being significant exceptions), I have been looking around for a philosophical critique of ethical objectivism. J. L. Mackie's well known book came to mind.

It is clear from the subtitle of this book that Mackie is not a behaviorist/evolutionary moralist. Indeed, the behavioral/evolutionary moralists are generally deeply critical of the notion that all moralities are possible and we can simply "invent" and socially instantiate the one that we prefer, as propounded by what John Tooby and Lida Cosmides have termed the "Standard Social Sciences Model." However, I thought he might have developed a cogent critique of objectivism even if his alternative is not acceptable. I was wrong. Mackie's arguments are, to my mind, extremely weak and not at all persuasive.

Mackie begins by defining ethics as "objective" if values are "part of the fabric of the world." But, both objectivists and behavioral/evolutionary moralists, in the sense defined above, believe that values are part of the fabric of the world, differing only on how we are to discover moral rules and their relation to empirical social practices. My objectivists care no more about what people say about ethics than a physicist cares about what people say about gravity. The physicist's skill and training trump anything folk-physics has to say about the subject. Behavioral/evolutionary ethicists, by contrast, value objectivist philosophical reasoning only when it gives insight into regularities concerning human moral principles and behavior.

Mackie's critique of objectivism, which he considers to be a critique of a moral skepticism sort, is based on two arguments. The first is the "relativist" argument that because people can vehemently and permanently disagree about the content of morality, and because there is not objective process of adjudicating disagreements of this sort, it is unlikely that morality is "part of the fabric" of the world. This argument, to my mind, has no weight at all. Language, for instance, is surely an objective part of human experience, but there are many highly distinct languages and linguistic structures.
The second of Mackie's critiques of objectivism is "the argument from queerness." He says that if morals are objective, then our way of knowing morals is different from that of knowing any other aspect of the fabric of the world (p. 38). But this is false. There are a hundred books on morality from the standpoint of traditional science, including arguments about the development of moral principle in species through Darwinian evolution.

So, my search for a philosophical critique of objectivist ethical theory goes on. Perhaps I should read the critiques of Foote and Chan to uncover the philosophical bases of objectivist ethics. Well, that should give me something to do on days that the Boston Celtics aren't playing.

The startling thing is that this book even needs to be written.
There are no objective moral facts -- if you think otherwise,
then name one. Whatever you name, I deny it (I can safely
do this without knowing what you name, since I deny all
purported objective moral facts). What argument can you muster
that it IS an objective moral fact? Any valid argument must
be based on some other objective moral fact, which I in turn
deny. I may well agree with this or that moral statement,
but that's simply a matter of subjective views. Some moral
statements might be agreed to by every subjective human being
on the planet -- that does not make them objective. This is
quite different from such objective facts as that the sun rose
this morning -- this is not a question that is open to
deliberation, or opinion. One has no choice but to agree
with the raw facts of observation; they are forced upon us in
a way that is not true of any moral claim.