What If Everybody Is Wrong?

Mackie's book opens with a sentence rather than an argument. There are no objective values.

The position is called error theory, and its structure is worth stating carefully, because it is regularly confused with two neighbours that are much less interesting.

It is not the view that moral statements are expressions of feeling rather than claims. Mackie thinks they are genuine claims, meant to describe how things are.

It is not relativism, on which moral claims are true relative to a society. Mackie thinks they are not true at all.

The view is that moral statements attempt to describe objective values, that this is what ordinary moral thought is doing, and that there are no such things, so the statements are systematically false. Not confused, not meaningless: false. Everybody is making the same mistake, in good faith, all the time.

He argues for it from two directions.

The first is the argument from relativity, and it starts from how deeply societies have disagreed. Not about details but about fundamentals, over long periods, without converging. Mackie's claim is that the best explanation of this pattern is that people's moral views reflect their ways of life rather than their perception of a common object. If there were objective values out there, you would expect something more like the convergence you get in astronomy.

The second is the argument from queerness, and it is the one that does the real damage.

Ask what an objective value would have to be. It would be a fact about the world which, all by itself, tells you what to do. Not a fact plus a desire, not a fact plus a convention: a fact with a built-in instruction. Nothing else in our picture of the world behaves that way.

And ask how you would detect it. Not by sight, or touch, or measurement, or inference from anything measurable. Moore said intuition, which names the faculty without explaining it.

So the objection has two halves: the thing would be very strange, and the faculty that perceives it would be stranger. Positing both needs far more defence than it usually receives.

Now the reply, which I think is the strongest available.

The argument from disagreement proves too much. Societies have disagreed deeply and persistently about the shape of the earth, the causes of disease, the age of the world and the motion of the planets. Nobody concludes there is no fact about any of them.

Deep disagreement is evidence about the difficulty of a subject, about who had access to what evidence, and about how strongly interests distort judgement. Converting it into evidence that there is nothing to know requires an additional premise, and that premise is rarely stated.

Finally, the thing most people get wrong about Mackie.

The title is Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, and the second half of the book is the inventing. Having concluded that morality is not discovered, he set about asking how it should be built, on what basis, for what purposes.

Denying that values are found is not the same as denying that they matter, and it is certainly not the claim that anything goes. It is a claim about where the authority comes from, and it leaves the question of what to build entirely open.