J. L. Mackie Quotes

The alternative to universalism is not an extreme individualism. Any possible, and certainly any desirable, life is social. We can see each individual as located in a number of circles — smaller and larger, but sometimes intersecting, not all concentric — and so united with others in a variety of ways. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.'

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

'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.

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.

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.