The challenge to objective values › What is supposed to be strange

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.