J.L. Mackie > Quotes

“the abandonment of a belief in objective values can cause, at least temporarily, a decay of subjective concern and sense of purpose. That it does so is evidence that the people in whom this reaction occurs have been tending to objectify their concerns and purposes, have been giving them a fictitious external authority. A claim to objectivity has been so strongly associated with their subjective concerns and purposes that the collapse of the former seems to undermine the latter as well.”
― John Leslie Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“The traditional arguments for the existence of God have been fairly thoroughly criticised by philosophers. But the theologian can, if he wishes, accept this criticism. He can admit that no rational proof of God's existence is possible. And he can still retain all that is essential to his position, by holding that God's existence is known in some other, non-rational way. I think, however, that a more telling criticism can be made by way of the traditional problem of evil. Here it can be shown, not that religious beliefs lack rational support, but that they are positively irrational, that the several parts of the essential theological doctrine are inconsistent with one another, so that the theologian can maintain his position as a whole only by a much more extreme rejection of reason than in the former case. He must now be prepared to believe, not merely what cannot be proved, but what can be disproved from other beliefs that he also holds.”
― J.L. Mackie

“The difficulty of seeing how values could be objective is a fairly strong reason for thinking that they are not so”
― John Leslie Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“There are no objective values.”
― John Leslie Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“The facts have to be determined by empirical evidence, and our thinking has then to conform to the facts, not the facts to our thinking”
― John Leslie Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“So far as ethics is concerned, my thesis that there are no objective values is specifically the denial that any such categorically imperative element is objectively valid.”
― John Leslie Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“Morality is not to be discovered but to be made: we have to decide what moral views to adopt, what moral stands to take.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“Men sometimes display active malevolence to one another, but even apart from that they are almost always concerned more with their selfish ends than with helping one another. The function of morality is primarily to counteract this limitation of men's sympathies. We can decide what the content of morality must be by inquiring how this can best be done.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“The argument from design, therefore, can be sustained only with the help of a supposedly a priori double-barrelled principle, that mental order (at least in a god) is self-explanatory, but that all material order not only is not self-explanatory, but is positively improbable and in need of further explanation...this double-barrelled principle is recognizable as the core of the cosmological argument...The argument will not take us even as far as Kant seems to allow without borrowing the a priori thesis that there is a vicious metaphysical contingency in all natural things, and, in contrast with this, the 'transcendental' concept of a god who is self-explanatory and necessarily existent. It is only with the help of these borrowings that the design argument can introduce the required asymmetry, that any natural explanation uses data which call for further explanation, but that the theistic explanation terminates the regress. Without this asymmetry, the design argument cannot show that there is any need to go beyond the sort of hypothesis that Hume foreshadowed and that Wallace and Darwin supplied... The dependence of the argument for design on the ideas that are the core of the cosmological one is greater than Kant realized.”
― J.L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God

“Different people have irresolvably different views of the good life – not only at different periods of history and in different forms of society, but even in our own culture at the present time.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“Of course there can be, and there plainly is, cooperation of many sorts that extends far beyond the range of self-referential altruism. It is the main function of any economic system to produce cooperation that is quite independent of affection or goodwill, and it is one function of political organizations to maintain conditions in which this is possible. But if we accept the centrality of self-love and confined generosity, we must, as a corollary, accept competition and some degree of conflict between individuals and between groups.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“For any individual a good life will be made up largely of the effective pursuit of activities that he finds worthwhile, either intrinsically, or because they are directly beneficial to others about whom he cares, or because he knows them to be instrumental in providing the means of wellbeing for himself and those closely connected to him. Egoism and self-referential altruism will together characterize, to a large extent, both his actions and his motives.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“Life is, fortunately, not a continuous application of game theory.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“In Plato’s theory the Forms, and in particular the Form of the Good, are eternal, extra-mental, realities. They are a very central structural element in the fabric of the world. But it is held also that just knowing them or ‘seeing’ them will not merely tell men what to do but will ensure that they do it, overruling any contrary inclinations.”
― John Leslie Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“Disagreement about moral codes seems to reflect people's adherence to and participation in different ways of life. The causal connections seems to be mainly that way round: it is that people approve of monogamy because they participate in a monogamous way of life rather than that they participate in a monogamous way of life because they approve of monogamy.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“The claim that values are not objective, are not part of the fabric of the world, is meant to include not only moral goodness, which might be most naturally equated with moral value, but also other things that could be more loosely called moral values or disvalues—rightness and wrongness, duty, obligation, an action’s being rotten and contemptible, and so on. It also includes non-moral values, notably aesthetic ones, beauty and various kinds of artistic merit.”
― John Leslie Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“Liberties conflict with one another, and almost any policy whatever can be represented as a defence — direct or indirect — of some sort of liberty. What we need, therefore, is not a general defence of liberty, but adjudication between particular rival claims to freedom.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“To say that someone has a right, of whatever sort, is to speak either of or within some legal or moral system: our rejection of objective values carries with it the denial that there are any self-subsistent rights.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“In one important sense of the word it is a paradigm case of injustice if a court declares someone to be guilty of an offence of which it knows him to be innocent. More generally, a finding is unjust if it is at variance with what the relevant law and the facts together require, and particularly if it is known by the court to be so.”
― John Leslie Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“Though we admit that the way to hell may be paved with good intentions, we are very sure that the way to heaven is not paved with bad ones.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“The happiness with which I am, inevitably, most concerned is my own, and next that of those who are in some way closely related to me. Indeed, for any reasonably benevolent person these cannot be separated: he will find much of his own happiness in the happiness of those for whom he cares, or in what he and they do together, where the enjoyment of each contributes so essentially to that of the other(s) that it will be more natural to say 'We had a good. . .' (whatever it was) than to speak of a mere sum of individual enjoyments.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“A morality in the broad sense would be a general, all-inclusive theory of conduct: the morality to which someone subscribed would be whatever body of principles he allowed ultimately to guide or determine his choices of action. In the narrow sense, a morality is a system of a particular sort of constraints on conduct — ones whose central task is to protect the interests of persons other than the agent and which present themselves to an agent as checks on his natural inclinations or spontaneous tendencies to act. In this narrow sense, moral considerations would be considerations from some limited range, and would not necessarily include everything that a man allowed to determine what he did. In the second sense, someone could say quite deliberately, 'I admit that morality requires that I should do such-and-such, but I don't intend to: for me other considerations here overrule the moral ones.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“Notoriously, there are disputed territories – for example, border areas and regions occupied by groups which are not independent nations, but many of whose members wish that they were. Again, there are territories like that which used to be called Palestine; here the principles which in the case of Norway point univocally to one national group as that to which the area belongs diverge, some supporting the claims of the Israelis and others the claims of the Palestinian Arabs. Cyprus and Northern Ireland are two other obvious examples of conflicting prima facie rights of distinguishable national groups.

In such cases the appeal, by both parties to a dispute, to supposedly absolute rights is disastrous. It reduces the readiness to negotiate and compromise, and it seems to justify any atrocities against the enemy, and any resulting losses and suffering for one's own side, that are needed to vindicate those rights.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“Conflicts of interest are real, inevitable, and ineradicable. There is no question of doing away with them, but it is increasingly important that they should be limited and contained.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“If we turn from the individual ownership of property to the occupation of territory by national groups much the same applies. The Norwegian people, say, have a right to continue to occupy and control the territory known as Norway; but that they have this right is not a consequence of any absolute law of nature but an uncontroversial application of principles to which national groups commonly appeal and which they are usually ready to recognize by allowing claims made in terms of them by other national groups.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“the weather is such as I would favour if I were a potato-grower – or, more dubiously, if I were a potato.”
― John Leslie Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“The denial that there are objective values does not commit one to any particular view about what moral statements mean, and certainly not to the view that they are equivalent to subjective reports.”
― John Leslie Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“Our sense of justice,' whether it is just yours and mine, or that of some much larger group, has no authority over those who dissent from its recommendations or even over us if we are inclined to change our minds.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“The denial of objective values can carry with it an extreme emotional reaction, a feeling that nothing matters at all, that life has lost its purpose. Of course this does not follow; the lack of objective values is not a good reason for abandoning subjective concern or for ceasing to want anything. But the abandonment of a belief in objective values can cause, at least temporarily, a decay of subjective concern and sense of purpose.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“Within any circle, large or small, we must expect and accept not only some cooperation but also some competition and conflict, but different kinds and degrees of these in circles of different size.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong