J. L. Mackie Quotes

It is simply an error, though no doubt an attractive and inspiring one, to suppose that there is one evil — capitalism, say, or colonialism — the destruction of which would make everything in the garden lovely.

The difficulty of seeing how values could be objective is a fairly strong reason for thinking that they are not so.

Hardly any part of anyone's conduct concerns only himself.

It is in imaginative literature — including those parts of it which pass for history and biography — that what may be good in human life is concretely represented.

If we admire and enjoy the flourishing of human life, we shall naturally delight also in the flourishing of animal life.

If men had been overwhelmingly benevolent, if each had aimed only at the happiness of all, if everyone had loved his neighbour as himself, there would. have been no need for the rules that constitute justice. Nor would there have been any need for them if nature had supplied abundantly, and without any effort on our part, all that we could want, if food and warmth had been as inexhaustibly available as, until recently, air and water seemed to be.

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.

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.

Men...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.

Does the right of a nation as it is at present to its territory include the right to forbid or to limit immigration, or to deny full citizenship to immigrants and even to the locally born children of immigrants? Obviously this raises the question just what is to count over time as the same nation.

The kinds of behaviour to which moral values and disvalues are ascribed are indeed part of the furniture of the world, and so are the natural, descriptive differences between them; but not, perhaps, their differences in value.

Mutual toleration might be easier to achieve if groups could realize that the ideals which determine their moralities in the broad sense are just that, the ideals of those who adhere to them, not objective values which impose requirements on all alike.

Mankind is not an agent; it has no unity of decision; it is therefore not confronted with any choices.

Morality is not to be discovered but to be made: we have to decide what moral views to adopt, what moral stands to take.

Life is, fortunately, not a continuous application of game theory.