Error Theory

We have been reading Slaves of the Passions in order to get insight into one of the two main challenges to moral realism. The Humean Theory of Reasons is important to understand this challenge because it is a premise in the most important argument that presses this challenge. Now it’s time for us to turn to one of this challenge’s main proponents, the Oxford Philosopher J.L. Mackie.

Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

In 1977, Mackie published a book called Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong that surprised most readers at that time with what people took to be a new view about metaethics. Readers at the time were familiar with the ideas of noncognitivism, according to which moral language and thought are not even trying to describe the world, and most people who were skeptical about moral realism identified with noncognitivism. But Mackie argued on the realist’s side for one of the main things that realists and noncognitivists disagree about - that moral thought and language really do try to describe or represent reality. He just thought that they make a fundamental mistake in doing so, and that nothing in reality is quite as ordinary moral thinking presupposes. Mackie’s view and views similar to it have come to be known as the moral error theory, and in class I have defined this view as the thesis that nothing is truly wrong.

J.L. Mackie

Minor Trigger Warning

In 1977 in Oxford, the time and place in which Mackie was writing, it was possible to use the word ‘queer’ to mean something like ‘peculiar’, and without any of the connotations of a homosexual slur - or at least in such a way that the users could be in self-denial about whether their use was sufficiently distinct by that use as to not be implicated by it. And one of Mackie’s most famous arguments in his book is what he calls the ‘Argument from Queerness’, according to which moral facts or properties are “just too queer” to exist. In class we’ll be trying to understand what this argument is and how it is supposed to work, and I’ll follow Mackie in using the word ‘queerness’, but I beg that all of you note and acknowledge that this word has a complicated history that after this warning I am going to completely ignore.

The Reading

For Monday’s class we are going to read chapter 1 of Mackie’s book, sections 1-9. This comes to about 28 pages, a little bit more more than we’ve been reading in the second half of the semester, but I think that you’ll find Mackie’s writing engaging and provocative. This chapter is what philosophers like to call a “rich text”, meaning that it is full of different thoughts and arguments that its author does not always distinguish from each other as well as we might, and in which a lot of later thinkers can each find inspiration even though that have very different ideas from one another. So we are definitely not going to cover everything that he says or figure out many of the most interesting interpretive questions about what he’s trying to say. But try to figure out what you think he means by saying that morality is “too queer”. That’s what we’ll discuss in class.