J.L. Mackie: Error Theory & Ethics

Biography

John Leslie Mackie was born on August 25, 1917, in Killara, a suburb of Sydney, Australia. He was the son of Alexander Mackie, an educator and later the first principal of the Sydney Teachers' College, and Annie Burnett Duncan. Growing up in a household devoted to education, Mackie showed early intellectual promise and won scholarships that took him to Sydney Grammar School and then to the University of Sydney. At Sydney he studied under the philosopher John Anderson, a strong realist and empiricist whose insistence on clarity, argument, and the rejection of fuzzy metaphysics left a permanent mark on Mackie's philosophical style. In 1938 Mackie won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oriel College, Oxford, where he studied under H.H. Price and came into contact with the analytical philosophy that was transforming British thought. The outbreak of the Second World War interrupted his studies; he served in the British and Australian armed forces, seeing service in the Middle East and the Pacific. After the war he returned to academic life, holding chairs at the University of Sydney (1946-1954), the University of Otago in New Zealand (1954-1959), the University of Sydney again (1959-1963), and finally, from 1967 until his retirement, a fellowship at University College, Oxford. He died on December 12, 1981, of a heart attack, at the height of his influence.

Historical Background

Mackie's philosophy grew out of the Australian empiricist tradition shaped by Anderson and the wider movement of twentieth-century analytic philosophy, whose leading figures included Bertrand Russell and the logical empiricists. His work was a series of determined attempts to bring clarity to the hardest questions in philosophy — free will, causation, the problem of evil, and the nature of morality — by the rigorous application of logical analysis. The immediate background of his ethics was the state of metaethics in the mid-twentieth century. G.E. Moore had defended the objectivity of value by arguing that moral properties are non-natural; the emotivists and prescriptivists had denied that moral judgments state facts at all; and the naturalists were attempting to ground morality in the natural world. Mackie found all of these unsatisfactory. Against the emotivists, he insisted that moral language is genuinely cognitive — it aims at truth. Against Moore, he argued that if moral properties are not natural, they do not exist. Against the naturalists, he argued that no natural property can supply the "objective prescriptivity" that moral claims demand. The result was the error theory.

Core Ideas

Mackie's central contribution to ethics is the error theory, which he defended in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977). The theory has two claims. The conceptual claim is that ordinary moral judgments presuppose "objective values": values that exist in the world independently of human attitudes, that are part of "the fabric of the world," and that carry objective prescriptivity — a demand-like authority that commands our action. When someone says "torture is wrong," they take themselves to be stating a fact about an objective wrongness. The ontological claim is that there are no such objective values. The world, as modern science and common sense reveal it, contains only natural facts; the queer, intrinsically prescriptive entities that moral realism requires are nowhere to be found. Therefore all positive moral judgments are false. Mackie supported the ontological claim with two arguments. The argument from relativity observes that moral codes vary enormously across cultures and eras, and that this diversity is best explained by the hypothesis that moral beliefs are projections of cultural practice rather than perceptions of objective facts. The argument from queerness argues that objective values, and the faculty of intuition required to know them, would be "queer" entities — utterly unlike anything in our scientific worldview — so we have no reason to believe in them. Mackie did not conclude that we should abandon morality; he suggested that we might continue to use moral language as a useful fiction, "inventing right and wrong" for ourselves.

Major Works

Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977) is Mackie's masterpiece and one of the most important works of twentieth-century metaethics. In it he defends the error theory against realism and non-cognitivism, argues for a subjectivist account of the "invention" of morality, and engages the major normative theories, defending a version of rule-utilitarianism as the most plausible of the candidates. His earlier Truth, Probability and Paradox (1973) applied analytical rigor to problems in the theory of truth. The Cement of the Universe (1974) defended a regularity theory of causation and is a landmark of the metaphysics of causation. The Miracle of Theism (1982) mounted a comprehensive argument against the existence of God, combining the problem of evil with arguments about the incoherence of the divine attributes. His Problems from Locke (1976) remains a standard philosophical commentary on John Locke's Essay. Throughout these works, the same virtues appear: lucidity, argumentative tenacity, and a determination to follow the argument wherever it leads.

Philosophical Influence

Mackie's influence on metaethics was profound and lasting. The error theory transformed moral skepticism from a position to be dismissed into a rigorous research program: philosophers who disagreed with Mackie were forced to answer his arguments from queerness and relativity, and a large literature defending and attacking the error theory grew up in the decades after 1977. The theory remains a live option in contemporary metaethics, defended in updated forms by philosophers such as Richard Joyce and Jonas Olson. Mackie's treatment of free will — defending the view that free will is incompatible with determinism and that we should embrace a compatibilist "useful fiction" — anticipated later debates. His work in the philosophy of religion set the agenda for the contemporary problem of evil. And his clear, combative style became a model for analytic philosophy: no philosopher of his generation did more to show that the hardest questions could be pursued with complete rigor and complete candor.

Related Concepts

Mackie's error theory is the paradigmatic form of moral nihilism and belongs to the anti-realist family of metaethics. It is the subject of the error theory entry, which is its companion page, and it builds on the is-ought problem of Hume. Mackie's argument inverts Moore's non-naturalism: both agree that moral properties are not natural properties; Moore concluded they exist, Mackie that they do not. The whole program is best understood within metaethics.