Day 7: Mackie on Subjectivism

•     Mackie’s Subjectivism

•     Kant and Mackie

•     Standards of Evaluation

•     Arguments from Queerness

–  Metaphysical

–  Epistemological

•     Argument from Relativity

•      Study for Test 1 on Day 8; Read Chapters 1 & 2 of Utilitarianism for Day 9

Mackie’s Subjectivism

•      What are first order questions/claims?

•      What are second order questions/claims?

•      What is Mackie’s thesis?  What sort of question is it an attempt to answer?

•      Remarks on Mackie’s Empiricist approach

Kant and Mackie

•      In what way does Mackie agree with Kant?

•      How does Mackie state his own thesis using Kantian language?

•      What does Mackie think is going on when we make first order claims?

Standards of Evaluation

•      What does Mackie mean when he writes about standards of evaluation?

•      In Kantian terms, what are standards of evaluation?

•      According to Mackie, what sort of objectivity could exist in ethics/morality?

Argument from Queerness: Metaphysical

1.   If there were objective values, they would be entities, qualities, or relations of a very strange sort.

2.   They would be different from anything else in nature.

3.   Therefore, there is no reason to think such strange things exist.

Argument from Queerness: Epistemological

1.   If there were objective values, we would need a very special sense to be aware of them.

2.   This sense would be different from any other sense we have (giving us a way of knowing which is different from any other way of knowing).

3.   There is no reason to think we have such a sense (and claiming that intuition is such a sense is a lame response.)

4.   Therefore, even if objective values existed, we could not know them.

Argument from Relativity

1.   There are variations in moral codes from place to place and time to time.

2.   These variations are better explained by the hypothesis that they reflect ways of life than by the hypothesis that they express perceptions, most of them seriously inadequate and badly distorted, of objective values.

3.   Therefore, there are no objective values.