The challenge to objective values › Explaining the appearance of objectivity

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.