J. L. Mackie Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

The abandonment of a belief in objective values can cause...a decay of subjective concern and sense of purpose. That it does so is evidence that...people...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.

On an assumption that the normal and proper state of affairs is that people should live as members of various circles, larger and smaller, with different kinds and degrees of cooperation, competition, and conflict in these different circles, the appropriateness of telling the truth becomes disputable. Truth-telling naturally goes along with cooperation; it is not obviously reasonable to tell the truth to a competitor or an enemy.

'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.

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.

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.

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

No doubt one can stretch the notion of egocentric commendation...by saying that appropriate conditional, perhaps counterfactually conditional, clauses are to be assumed. The carving knife is one such as I would favour if I wanted to slice meat; the sunset is one such as I would favour if I were one for the beauties of nature; the weather is such as I would favour if I were a potato-grower — or, more dubiously, if I were a potato. But this is stretching the account, and it is gratuitous. What is common to all these cases is that in each there is, somewhere in the picture, some set of requirements or wants or interests, and the thing that is called good is being said to be such as to satisfy those requirements or wants or interests.

On our view of morality we can defend only nearly absolute principles. But a theist can believe that strictly absolute variants of these are commanded by God, and that we both must and can safely obey them even when from the point of view of human reason the case against doing so seems overwhelming: we can rely on God to avert or somehow put right the disastrous consequences of a 'moral' choice. But though a theist can believe this, it would gratuitous for him to do so without a reliable and explicit revelation of such absolute commands.

If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.

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.

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