Liberties conflict with one another, and almost any policy whatever can be represented as a defence — direct or indirect — of some sort of liberty. W… - J. L. Mackie

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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.

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About J. L. Mackie

John Leslie Mackie FBA (25 August 1917 – 12 December 1981) was an Australian philosopher. He made significant contributions to ethics, the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language. Mackie had influential views on metaethics, including his defence of moral scepticism and his sophisticated defence of atheism.

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Alternative Names: John Leslie Mackie John L. Mackie JL Mackie J.L. Mackie
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Additional quotes by J. L. Mackie

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.

If we see the good for man as happiness, conceived as a single, undifferentiated commodity, we may also suppose that it could be provided for all, in some centrally planned way, if only we could get an authority that was sufficiently powerful and sufficiently intelligent, and also one that we could trust to be uniformly well-disposed to all its subjects; and then the natural corollary would be that all property should be owned by all in common, collectively, and applied to the maximizing of the general happiness under the direction of this benevolent authority. But if we reject this unitary notion of happiness, and identify the good for man rather with the partly competitive pursuit of diverse ideals and private goals, then separate ownership of property will be an appropriate instrument for this pursuit.

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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.

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