Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

Imagine a person who condemns a betrayal even after everyone around them accepts it. They might mean that the betrayal violates a standard that applies regardless of anyone's approval. That is a stronger claim than saying they dislike it or that their community prohibits it. The question is what would make that stronger claim true.

J.L. Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, published in 1977, challenges the existence of objective values. His opening chapter distinguishes this challenge from indifference to suffering or a decision to ignore other people. He is examining the status of moral judgments: what they purport to say about the world, and whether the world contains what those judgments require.

Mackie's argument has two parts. He thinks ordinary moral thought claims an objective authority, and he thinks that authority is not a feature of reality. Understanding the connection between those claims is essential. Disagreement with a moral rule, criticism of its effects, and doubt about objective value are different positions.

A first-order ethical judgment concerns what to do or how to evaluate conduct. Saying that a betrayal is wrong makes such a judgment. A second-order question concerns the status of that judgment: whether it describes an objective value, expresses an attitude, or depends on a particular standard.

Mackie introduces his skepticism as a second-order position (chapter 1, section 1). His claim is not that every action is equally acceptable. Nor is it simply a recommendation to disregard conventional morality. Someone could reject a society's moral code while believing strongly in objective moral standards; that person would disagree with Mackie about the second-order question.

Conversely, someone could doubt objective value while remaining committed to protecting people from harm. The commitment would need to be understood without appealing to the objective prescriptivity Mackie rejects. Whether that reconstruction is satisfactory is a further issue, rather than something settled by the definition of skepticism.

The distinction prevents a misleading shortcut. If a person accepts error theory, we cannot infer from that alone which policies they support or how generously they behave. A claim about what exists is not a complete description of a person's motives or commitments.

Mackie's target is stronger than consistency, impartiality, or agreement. A rule could be applied consistently by a community without possessing objective authority. A person could also judge impartially while denying that values exist independently of human purposes.

His concern is with objective prescriptivity: a demand for action that is supposed to belong to the value itself, rather than derive its authority from someone's desire or an accepted institution. The demand purports to apply whether the person happens to want to comply.

Consider an original illustration. A rule in a chess club might prohibit late arrival because the members have agreed on a schedule. We can establish what that rule requires by consulting the agreement. A claim that deliberately humiliating a person is wrong, regardless of anyone's agreement, asks for a different kind of authority. Mackie thinks ordinary moral thought commonly makes that stronger claim.

This is not a denial that facts about harm, agreements, or motives can be objective in an ordinary sense. Whether an agreement was made and whether someone was injured can be factual questions. Mackie denies the further objectively prescriptive value, not every descriptive fact involved in evaluating a situation.

Mackie does not simply reinterpret ordinary moral judgments as reports of preferences. His account says that moral thought makes a claim it fails to satisfy. That is why he describes it as an error theory (chapter 1, sections 5–7).

There is a conceptual claim about what ordinary moral judgments purport to assert, followed by an ontological claim about what exists. If the purportedly objective values are absent, judgments that positively ascribe those values cannot be true as intended. The error is systematic because it concerns the kind of authority claimed, rather than an isolated mistake about a particular action.

Care is needed with the slogan that every moral sentence is false. A theory about positive moral ascriptions is not permission to ignore negation, conditional sentences, or statements about what a community believes. "This community prohibits betrayal" may be a true descriptive report even if the community's claim to objective authority is mistaken.

The same caution applies to the thought that error theory establishes the opposite of every moral judgment. Denying that an action has an objective property of wrongness does not establish that it has an objective property of rightness. Mackie's challenge concerns the supposed objective status of value, not a reversal of the conventional moral ranking.

There are two main ways to resist the theory. One can dispute his account of what moral thought claims, or one can defend the existence of objective values. A successful criticism of only one part would already undermine the argument connecting ordinary moral thought to systematic error.

Mackie uses "subjectivism" in discussing his position, but distinguishes his view from a simple account of moral language (chapter 1, section 2). The word can refer to a theory about what moral sentences mean, or to a denial of objective values. Those are different questions.

A simple subjectivist analysis might interpret "That action is wrong" as a report that the speaker disapproves of it. Such a report could be true when the disapproval is real. Mackie's error theory instead claims that the moral judgment reaches beyond the attitude and mistakenly attributes objective prescriptivity.

An expressive account offers another possibility: moral speech may primarily express an attitude rather than describe an objective property. That approach would need its own account of moral disagreement and reasoning. It would not become Mackie's theory merely because it also rejects objective value.

Relativism is another position to distinguish. Saying that a judgment is true relative to a community's standards gives it a kind of truth under a specified framework. Mackie uses variation in standards as evidence against objectivity, but the argument from variation is not itself a definition of moral truth as relative.

These distinctions matter when interpreting his title. Calling morality invented does not by itself identify one settled view about the meaning, truth, or practical use of every moral expression. His specific argument has to be reconstructed rather than replaced with a general slogan about human construction.

Mackie's first major argument begins from variation between moral codes and ways of life (chapter 1, section 8). He asks how that variation is best explained. His answer gives an important role to social conditions and the activities in which people participate.

The argument does not have the form: people disagree, therefore there is no truth. Disagreement also occurs about matters with objective answers. Mackie explicitly considers the possibility that moral disagreement reflects incomplete knowledge or different circumstances.

His stronger claim is explanatory. He thinks differences in ways of life help explain differences in moral codes better than a story in which communities imperfectly perceive one independent order of value. On his account, people may endorse certain standards because of the social activities they have learned to take part in.

As an original illustration, imagine two communities with different expectations about obligations to extended family. Their economic arrangements and patterns of dependence might help explain why they disagree. This possibility would not establish that either community is correct or that neither has access to an objective truth. It identifies the sort of explanatory alternative Mackie's argument requires us to consider.

A defender of objectivity can respond that the same underlying principle produces different judgments under different conditions. Mackie recognizes this route. The dispute then concerns whether those general principles are themselves best understood as responses to objective requirements, or as patterns of valuing shaped by human life.

To assess the argument, we therefore need more than a list of striking disagreements. We need to compare explanations, distinguish different factual circumstances from different evaluative commitments, and ask what each account can explain. Mere persistence of disagreement cannot carry all that work.

The argument from queerness concerns the kind of thing objective values would have to be (chapter 1, section 9). In this context the term means strangeness or unusualness. Mackie develops both a metaphysical question about what would exist and an epistemological question about how we could know it.

The metaphysical issue is the combination of a feature of reality with authority over action. A shape or a location does not, simply in virtue of being recognized, prescribe what a person must pursue. Objective value, on the picture Mackie challenges, would contain an authoritative direction within its very character.

His discussion of Plato's Form of the Good makes the issue vivid. The Good would be something whose recognition provided a direction to pursue it, rather than merely information to be combined with an independently given purpose. Mackie thinks that sort of built-in prescriptivity requires an account that ordinary descriptions of the world do not supply.

It is important to separate a reason from a psychological compulsion. Saying that a requirement applies independently of someone's desires need not mean that recognizing it makes disobedience impossible. An unmotivated or defiant person is therefore not, by themselves, a conclusive refutation of every form of moral realism.

The issue is whether objective value could have the claimed authority and how that authority relates to motivation. A defender of realism may deny that objectivity requires the exact intrinsic motivational character Mackie attributes to it. That response challenges the target of the argument, rather than merely accepting its conclusion.

The epistemological part asks what kind of access we could have to objectively prescriptive properties. If moral knowledge requires a special intuition quite unlike ordinary ways of knowing, Mackie thinks that requirement counts against the view.

He also asks how moral properties would relate to the natural features on which they depend. Suppose two actions differ in cruelty. A moral explanation often appeals to what the agents did, their intentions, and the suffering involved. Why should those features have the additional property of objective wrongness, and how would we know the connection?

This is not answered merely by repeating that cruelty is wrong. The question concerns the link between the descriptive features and the allegedly objective value. An account of moral knowledge must explain both what is known and how the relevant connection is accessible.

A possible response is that moral properties are natural properties, rather than a separate category apprehended by a special faculty. That would alter the metaphysical picture Mackie is attacking. The remaining question is whether such a natural account can explain the authority claimed in moral judgment.

Another response could accept fundamental normative facts while rejecting the demand that all genuine knowledge resemble empirical observation. This creates a challenge to Mackie's standards of explanation. He must explain why the alleged peculiarity is a reason to reject objective value rather than a reason to broaden the account of what exists.

These are possible lines of argument, not reports of a settled resolution. Calling a property strange identifies a burden of explanation. It does not dispense with examining whether the burden can be met.

Mackie supplements his criticisms with an account of why people might believe in objective values even if there are none (chapter 1, section 10). He calls attention to objectification: treating attitudes or demands as though they were features of the world.

Social requirements can come to be experienced as authoritative independently of the people who sustain them. An individual's approval or disapproval can also be projected outward, so that something appears admirable or objectionable in itself. Mackie uses these possibilities to explain the apparent objectivity that his theory denies.

As an original hypothetical illustration, imagine a child who learns a rule through correction and later experiences it as unquestionable. The example makes a proposed process intelligible. It is not a developmental study, a guarantee about children, or evidence that any particular conviction was formed in that way.

Even an established causal explanation of a belief would not automatically show that the belief is false. People acquire true beliefs through social learning too. To support error theory, the explanation must work alongside arguments that the objective features purportedly represented do not exist.

This qualification keeps genealogy and justification separate. Explaining how someone came to condemn an act can matter, but it is not the same as deciding whether the condemnation is true. Mackie needs the ontological argument as well as the proposed explanation of belief.

Rejecting objective prescriptivity does not logically remove human needs, attachments, or vulnerability. It also does not determine a complete moral code. A person who accepts Mackie's second-order conclusion still faces choices about how to live with others.

Consider an original example of two people deciding how to share care for a relative. They may agree that the work must be done and disagree about how to distribute it. Describing their interests and dependencies can inform deliberation even if neither appeals to a value existing independently of all human concerns.

The example does not prove that negotiation yields justice or that a skeptic can reproduce every feature of objective obligation. It shows why the practical problem survives the metaphysical dispute. People still need to make decisions under conditions of conflicting interests and limited resources.

Conversely, a recommendation to preserve useful moral practices does not follow from error theory alone. It requires further commitments about what matters and what arrangements deserve support. A title about inventing morality should not be read as a deduction that any invention is equally acceptable.

The need for those further commitments is one reason Mackie's theory can be demanding. It removes one claimed foundation without automatically providing an agreed replacement. Whether that loss is fatal to ethical reasoning is a substantive objection to examine, rather than an implication to assume.

A careful assessment can begin with a particular moral judgment. Ask what authority the judgment claims. Does it purport to bind independently of desire and convention? Is it instead a report about a rule, a personal commitment, or an expression of an attitude?

Then examine the case against the objective feature. Does moral variation support Mackie's preferred explanation? Does the proposed value require a peculiar kind of existence or knowledge? Could a different account preserve objectivity without accepting every feature Mackie assigns to it?

Finally, separate the truth of a judgment from its practical role. A belief can motivate cooperation without being true, and a useful belief is not made true by its usefulness. Equally, showing that a person benefits from making a claim does not show that its content is false.

Mackie's challenge is precise enough to permit disagreement at each of these points. We can question his account of ordinary moral thought, his explanation of variation, or his standards of metaphysical plausibility. What we should avoid is answering a second-order argument merely by insisting that moral conduct matters.

• J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977). Read chapter 1, "The Subjectivity of Values," especially sections 1–2 for the scope of skepticism, 5–7 for claims to objectivity and error theory, and 8–10 for relativity, queerness, and objectification. An accessible chapter extract contains these arguments.