Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong by J.L. Mackie

Context

Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977) is the masterwork of J.L. Mackie, the culmination of his career-long project of bringing analytic clarity to the foundations of morality. The book appeared at a pivotal moment in the history of metaethics. For decades, the field had been dominated by non-cognitivism — the emotivism of A.J. Ayer and C.L. Stevenson, and the prescriptivism of R.M. Hare — according to which moral judgments express attitudes or prescriptions rather than facts. Mackie found this unsatisfying: moral language, he insisted, is genuinely cognitive, aiming at truth. But he equally rejected the realist alternative, whether the non-naturalism of G.E. Moore or the naturalism of the utilitarian tradition. His diagnosis was that both sides had missed a third possibility: moral judgments aim at truth but systematically fail. The book is short, lucid, and free of technical apparatus, and it succeeded in making the error theory the standard reference point for moral skepticism, while also engaging the great normative theories and defending a version of rule-utilitarianism as the best of the available "inventions."

Core Arguments

The book's central thesis is the error theory, defended through a chain of arguments. The first step is conceptual: Mackie argues that ordinary moral thought presupposes objective values — values that exist in the world independently of human attitudes and carry "objective prescriptivity," a demand-like authority. When we say "torture is wrong," we take ourselves to be stating a fact about an objective wrongness. The second step is ontological: no such objective values exist. Mackie offers two arguments. The argument from relativity (or disagreement) observes that moral codes vary enormously across cultures and eras, and that this diversity is best explained as projection of cultural practice rather than perception of objective facts. The argument from queerness contends that objective values would be "queer" entities: unlike anything in the natural world, they would have to be intrinsically prescriptive — commanding us, as it were — and we would need an equally queer faculty of intuition to perceive them. Since modern science gives us no reason to believe in such entities or faculties, we should conclude they do not exist. The third step is the negative conclusion: since moral judgments systematically presuppose something that does not exist, all positive moral judgments are false. The fourth step is constructive: morality, Mackie argues, is a human invention, a social device for regulating behavior, which we may choose to retain as a useful fiction rather than a discovery.

Key Concepts

Three concepts anchor the book. Objective prescriptivity is Mackie's term for what moral language presupposes: values that are not merely valued by us but demand our action from outside, as it were. This is the feature of moral claims that neither naturalism (which reduces values to facts that do not command) nor non-cognitivism (which reduces them to attitudes we project) can preserve — and its absence is what convicts moral discourse of error. The argument from queerness is Mackie's most famous contribution: it attacks both the ontology of objective values (what kind of thing could such a value be?) and the epistemology of moral intuition (what faculty could perceive it?). The invention of morality is his constructive alternative: morality is a human artifact, created to coordinate social life, and understanding this frees us from the illusion that moral rules have external authority while allowing us to assess them rationally. The book also introduces the distinction between first-order and second-order questions about ethics, which became standard in the field.

Legacy & Influence

Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong transformed moral skepticism from a position to be dismissed into a research program. It generated an enormous literature: realists of every stripe — naturalists like Peter Railton, non-naturalists like Derek Parfit — wrote to answer Mackie's arguments, and a new generation of error theorists (Richard Joyce, Jonas Olson) continues to defend his view. The book's arguments became the standard point of entry for any discussion of moral skepticism, nihilism, or the objectivity of value. Its impact extends beyond philosophy: the idea that morality is "invented" rather than discovered resonates with popular skepticism and with social-scientific accounts of morality as a cultural construct.

Reading Guide

The book is short and readable. Chapter 1, "The Subjectivity of Values," contains the famous statement of the error theory, the arguments from relativity and queerness, and the discussion of moral objectivity; it is essential reading and can stand alone. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the meanings of "good" and "ought," arguing that they are saturated with the presupposition of objectivity. Chapters 4 and 5 turn to first-order ethics, where Mackie defends rule-utilitarianism. Chapters 6 through 8 apply the framework to rights, justice, and the relation between morality and law. For a first reading, focus on Chapters 1, 4, and 5.

Related Works

The book is best read alongside the works it engages and the works it provoked. G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica (1903) is the non-naturalist target whose argument Mackie inverts, and David Hume's Treatise Book III supplies the sentimentalist background. On the response side, Peter Railton's "Moral Realism" (1986) and Derek Parfit's On What Matters (2011) defend realism, while Richard Joyce's The Myth of Morality (2001) updates Mackie's view. Related discussions include the error theory and moral skepticism.