J. L. Mackie

Morality is not to be discovered but to be made.

John Leslie Mackie FBA (25 August 1917 – 12 December 1981) was an Australian philosopher. He made significant contributions to ethics, the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language. Mackie had influential views on metaethics, including his defence of moral scepticism and his sophisticated defence of atheism.

Quotes

Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977)

• There are no objective values.
  • Ch. 1, sec. 1

• The kinds of behaviour to which moral values and disvalues are ascribed are indeed part of the furniture of the world, and so are the natural, descriptive differences between them; but not, perhaps, their differences in value.
  • Ch. 1, sec. 1

• The denial that there are objective values does not commit one to any particular view about what moral statements mean, and certainly not to the view that they are equivalent to subjective reports.
  • Ch. 1, sec. 2

• The difficulty of seeing how values could be objective is a fairly strong reason for thinking that they are not so.
  • Ch. 1, sec. 3

• In one important sense of the word it is a paradigm case of injustice if a court declares someone to be guilty of an offence of which it knows him to be innocent. More generally, a finding is unjust if it is at variance with what the relevant law and the facts together require, and particularly if it is known by the court to be so.
  • Ch. 1, sec. 5

• The abandonment of a belief in objective values can cause...a decay of subjective concern and sense of purpose. That it does so is evidence that...people...have been tending to objectify their concerns and purposes, have been giving them a fictitious external authority. A claim to objectivity has been so strongly associated with their subjective concerns and purposes that the collapse of the former seems to undermine the latter as well.
  • Ch. 1, sec. 7

• Disagreement about moral codes seems to reflect people's adherence to and participation in different ways of life. The causal connections seems to be mainly that way round: it is that people approve of monogamy because they participate in a monogamous way of life rather than that they participate in a monogamous way of life because they approve of monogamy.
  • Ch. 1, sec. 8

• 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.
  • Ch. 1, sec. 9

• No doubt one can stretch the notion of egocentric commendation...by saying that appropriate conditional, perhaps counterfactually conditional, clauses are to be assumed. The carving knife is one such as I would favour if I wanted to slice meat; the sunset is one such as I would favour if I were one for the beauties of nature; the weather is such as I would favour if I were a potato-grower — or, more dubiously, if I were a potato. But this is stretching the account, and it is gratuitous. What is common to all these cases is that in each there is, somewhere in the picture, some set of requirements or wants or interests, and the thing that is called good is being said to be such as to satisfy those requirements or wants or interests.
  • Ch. 2, sec. 1

• 'Our sense of justice,' whether it is just yours and mine, or that of some much larger group, has no authority over those who dissent from its recommendations or even over us if we are inclined to change our minds.
  • Ch. 5, sec. 1
  • Cf. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971)

• Morality is not to be discovered but to be made: we have to decide what moral views to adopt, what moral stands to take.
  • Ch. 5, sec. 1

• A morality in the broad sense would be a general, all-inclusive theory of conduct: the morality to which someone subscribed would be whatever body of principles he allowed ultimately to guide or determine his choices of action. In the narrow sense, a morality is a system of a particular sort of constraints on conduct — ones whose central task is to protect the interests of persons other than the agent and which present themselves to an agent as checks on his natural inclinations or spontaneous tendencies to act. In this narrow sense, moral considerations would be considerations from some limited range, and would not necessarily include everything that a man allowed to determine what he did. In the second sense, someone could say quite deliberately, 'I admit that morality requires that I should do such-and-such, but I don't intend to: for me other considerations here overrule the moral ones.'
  • Ch. 5, sec. 1

• Men...are almost always concerned more with their selfish ends than with helping one another. The function of morality is primarily to counteract this limitation of men's sympathies. We can decide what the content of morality must be by inquiring how this can best be done.
  • Ch. 5, sec. 2

• If men had been overwhelmingly benevolent, if each had aimed only at the happiness of all, if everyone had loved his neighbour as himself, there would. have been no need for the rules that constitute justice. Nor would there have been any need for them if nature had supplied abundantly, and without any effort on our part, all that we could want, if food and warmth had been as inexhaustibly available as, until recently, air and water seemed to be.
  • Ch. 5, sec. 2

• Mankind is not an agent; it has no unity of decision; it is therefore not confronted with any choices.
  • Ch. 5, sec. 5

• Life is, fortunately, not a continuous application of game theory.
  • Ch. 7, sec. 3

• Though we admit that the way to hell may be paved with good intentions, we are very sure that the way to heaven is not paved with bad ones.
  • Ch. 7, sec. 5

• Different people have irresolvably different views of the good life — not only at different periods of history and in different forms of society, but even in our own culture at the present time.
  • Ch. 8, sec. 1

• It is in imaginative literature — including those parts of it which pass for history and biography — that what may be good in human life is concretely represented.
  • Ch. 8, sec. 1

• The happiness with which I am, inevitably, most concerned is my own, and next that of those who are in some way closely related to me. Indeed, for any reasonably benevolent person these cannot be separated: he will find much of his own happiness in the happiness of those for whom he cares, or in what he and they do together, where the enjoyment of each contributes so essentially to that of the other(s) that it will be more natural to say 'We had a good...' (whatever it was) than to speak of a mere sum of individual enjoyments.
  • Ch. 8, sec. 1

• It is the main function of any economic system to produce cooperation that is quite independent of affection or goodwill, and it is one function of political organizations to maintain conditions in which this is possible. But if we accept the centrality of self-love and confined generosity, we must, as a corollary, accept competition and some degree of conflict between individuals and between groups.
  • Ch. 8, sec. 1

• The alternative to universalism is not an extreme individualism. Any possible, and certainly any desirable, life is social. We can see each individual as located in a number of circles — smaller and larger, but sometimes intersecting, not all concentric — and so united with others in a variety of ways. Within any circle, large or small, we must expect and accept not only some cooperation but also some competition and conflict, but different kinds and degrees of these in circles of different size.
  • Ch. 8, sec. 1

• Each individual is linked not only to his biological ancestors but also to traditions of activity and information and thought and belief and value; nearly all of what anyone most distinctively and independently is he owes to many others. The taking over and passing on — with perhaps some changes — of a cultural inheritance is itself a part of the good life, and this too is a social relation to which there belong appropriate sorts of conflict as well as cooperation.
  • Ch. 8, sec. 1

• We want people to see it as not only legitimate but right and proper that they should pursue what they see as their own well-being.
  • Ch. 8, sec. 2

• To say that someone has a right, of whatever sort, is to speak either of or within some legal or moral system: our rejection of objective values carries with it the denial that there are any self-subsistent rights.
  • Ch. 8, sec. 2

• If we see the good for man as happiness, conceived as a single, undifferentiated commodity, we may also suppose that it could be provided for all, in some centrally planned way, if only we could get an authority that was sufficiently powerful and sufficiently intelligent, and also one that we could trust to be uniformly well-disposed to all its subjects; and then the natural corollary would be that all property should be owned by all in common, collectively, and applied to the maximizing of the general happiness under the direction of this benevolent authority. But if we reject this unitary notion of happiness, and identify the good for man rather with the partly competitive pursuit of diverse ideals and private goals, then separate ownership of property will be an appropriate instrument for this pursuit.
  • Ch. 8, sec. 2

• Does the right of a nation as it is at present to its territory include the right to forbid or to limit immigration, or to deny full citizenship to immigrants and even to the locally born children of immigrants? Obviously this raises the question just what is to count over time as the same nation.
  • Ch. 8, sec. 2

• Notoriously, there are disputed territories — for example, border areas and regions occupied by groups which are not independent nations, but many of whose members wish that they were. Again, there are territories like that which used to be called Palestine; here the principles which in the case of Norway point univocally to one national group as that to which the area belongs diverge, some supporting the claims of the Israelis and others the claims of the Palestinian Arabs. Cyprus and Northern Ireland are two other obvious examples of conflicting prima facie rights of distinguishable national groups.
  In such cases the appeal, by both parties to a dispute, to supposedly absolute rights is disastrous. It reduces the readiness to negotiate and compromise, and it seems to justify any atrocities against the enemy, and any resulting losses and suffering for one's own side, that are needed to vindicate those rights.
  • Ch. 8, sec. 2

• Hardly any part of anyone's conduct concerns only himself.
  • Ch. 8, sec. 3

• Liberties conflict with one another, and almost any policy whatever can be represented as a defence — direct or indirect — of some sort of liberty. What we need, therefore, is not a general defence of liberty, but adjudication between particular rival claims to freedom.
  • Ch. 8, sec. 3

• On an assumption that the normal and proper state of affairs is that people should live as members of various circles, larger and smaller, with different kinds and degrees of cooperation, competition, and conflict in these different circles, the appropriateness of telling the truth becomes disputable. Truth-telling naturally goes along with cooperation; it is not obviously reasonable to tell the truth to a competitor or an enemy.
  • Ch. 8, sec. 4

• If we admire and enjoy the flourishing of human life, we shall naturally delight also in the flourishing of animal life.
  • Ch. 8, sec. 8

• The facts have to be determined by empirical evidence, and our thinking has then to conform to the facts, not the facts to our thinking
  • Ch. 9, sec. 3

• On our view of morality we can defend only nearly absolute principles. But a theist can believe that strictly absolute variants of these are commanded by God, and that we both must and can safely obey them even when from the point of view of human reason the case against doing so seems overwhelming: we can rely on God to avert or somehow put right the disastrous consequences of a 'moral' choice. But though a theist can believe this, it would gratuitous for him to do so without a reliable and explicit revelation of such absolute commands.
  • Ch. 10, sec. 1

• Mutual toleration might be easier to achieve if groups could realize that the ideals which determine their moralities in the broad sense are just that, the ideals of those who adhere to them, not objective values which impose requirements on all alike.
  • Ch. 10, sec. 2

• Conflicts of interest are real, inevitable, and ineradicable. There is no question of doing away with them, but it is increasingly important that they should be limited and contained.
  • Ch. 10, sec. 3

• It is simply an error, though no doubt an attractive and inspiring one, to suppose that there is one evil — capitalism, say, or colonialism — the destruction of which would make everything in the garden lovely.
  • Ch. 10, sec. 3