About objectivity in morals

Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, J. L. Mackie, 1977.

Mackie thinks that moral judgments purport to ascribe objective traits, and in this I think he is right.

And just as, for example, actions may be clumsy, ill-timed, opportune, inept, quick, or painless, they purportedly may have the traits purportedly ascribed, for example, by “right” or “wrong” quite apart from any affective or conative relation in which they might stand to us, to anyone, or to everyone.

But while he is also right in supposing that moral judgments purport to express overriding, or at least enormously weighty, reasons for or against whatever they concern, he is mistaken, I think, in accepting the philosophers’ extravagance that the purported moral traits must themselves be or purportedly are intrinsically action-guiding and prescriptive.

Indeed, he thinks this is what is distinctive about supposed moral traits, and then argues from these features that such traits must not really exist.

[A]though most people in making moral judgments implicitly claim, among other things, to be pointing to something objectively prescriptive, these claims are all false. 

It is this that makes the name “moral skepticism” appropriate.

(Penguin pelican pb edition, 1978, page 35)

His chief argument against the existence of moral traits, thus characterized, is that thus characterized they would be very strange, indeed, and to know which things had or did not have such traits we would need a special and exotic faculty of knowledge built, as it were, for the purpose.

For instance, writing specifically of Plato’s Form of the Good, he says this (page 40).

Plato’s Forms give a dramatic picture of objective values would have to be. 

The Form of the Good is such that knowledge of it provides the knower with both a direction and an overriding motive; something’s being good both tells the person who knows this to pursue it and makes him pursues it. 

An objective good would be sought by anyone acquainted with it, not because of any contingent fact that this person, or every person, is so constituted that he desires this end, but just because the end has to-be-pursuedness somehow built into it. 

Similarly, if there were objective principles of right and wrong, any wrong (possible) course of action would have not-to-be-doneness somehow built into it.

For the coup-de-grace he explains the supposed property of wrongness would have to supervene upon the possession of natural properties like deliberate cruelty and then huffs and puffs that supervenience is itself too queer to endure.

But, as I said, I think he is quite mistaken in going so far.

And by the way, Mackie appeals to these alleged characteristics of purported moral traits to argue that meta-ethical naturalism, the view that moral terms in moral use denote “natural” properties like, for instance, being conducive to the best balance of pleasure over pain, no matter whose, cannot be right since no natural property itself has the requisite properties of to-be-doneness, etc.

But it is better to simply argue with respect to any natural trait alleged to be the topic of moral judgments that that’s just not what anybody, except by idiosyncratic stipulation, actually means, which is clearly true.