The challenge to objective values › Different senses of subjectivism

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.