The challenge to objective values › The question behind the judgment

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.