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Error Theory. John Mackie, The Subjectivity of Values. Argument. 1) Moral judgments express beliefs and have a truth value. ( cognitivism ) 2) There are no objective moral values (non-realism) 3) Therefore, all moral judgments are systematically and uniformly false. Premise 1.
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Error Theory John Mackie, The Subjectivity of Values
Argument 1) Moral judgments express beliefs and have a truth value. (cognitivism) 2) There are no objective moral values (non-realism) 3) Therefore, all moral judgments are systematically and uniformly false.
Premise 1 • The idea is that when people make an ethical claim, such as “Killing is wrong,” they are not simply intending to express an emotion. • They are also not intending to report a subjective state. • They are intending to make an objective claim.
Premise 2 • However, moral values are not things that exists independent of our thinking. • They are not real entities that are part of the world. • They are simply human fabrications or inventions that are dependent on the human mind. • Therefore, there are no objective moral values.
Conclusion • The conclusion is that all moral judgments, as the ones described in premise 1, are false.
Subjective Moral Claims • There is some confusion about whether philosophers are trying to determine what the moral judgments are intended to be or what they actually are. • Error theory argues that moral judgments are intended to be objective (and thus are always false) and are in actuality subjective judgments.
Subjective Moral Judgments • Notice that, if one intended moral judgments to be subjective rather than objective, then they would all be true, instead of false.
Central Issues • The controversial issue in error theory is that there are no objective moral values. • This is the thesis that requires defending.
3 Arguments in Defense of Non-realism 1) Relativity 2) Queerness 3) Epistemology
Relativity Argument • Those who maintain that there are objective moral values need to explain why there are so many divergent moral codes. • The moral cultural relativity that exists is inconsistent with the view that there are some transcendent, universal moral standards.
Queerness Argument • If there were objective moral values what would they be like? • First, they would have to be independent of human beings; in other words, they would have to be things that exists in the universe independent of us. • Second, they would have to be the kind of things that would be accessible to us. • Third, if moral values exists, they would have to give us reason to act and motivate us to act.
“Utterly Different” • Once we have described objective moral values, Mackie argues that these things are “utterly different” from anything in the universe. • What he means is not simply that they are unique, because all things in some sense can be considered unique. We are all unique beings. • However we are not utterly different. In fact we are very similar in essential ways to other human beings.
Objective Moral Values are Essentially Different • What Mackie means then is that objective moral values are different KINDS of things. • They are a type of thing of which there are no others like it. And thus there existence would posit a completely DIFFERENT KIND of being, increasing our ontology unnecessarily.
Reason to act • Finally, Mackie argues that it is contradictory to hold that objective moral values are both independent of us and at the same time they motivate us to act. • The only thing that can truly motivate us are psychological states such as desires; however, if objective moral values are independent of our thoughts and minds, then they cannot give us a reason to act.
Epistemological Argument • If objective moral values exist they would be accessible to us. • However, because they are essentially different kinds of things from anything else that exists in the universe, it is difficult to see how we would be able to acquire knowledge of them. Certainly not through the senses or through reason. • We would have to simply invent a special moral intuition and this seems arbitrary.
Criticisms 1) Inconsistent about accepting the way we speak about morality. First, in premise 1 Mackie seems to give weight to the way we speak about morality. He claims that we intend it to be objective. However, in premise 2, he no longer gives any weight to how we speak about morality, since we do speak of morality objectively and as having a truth value.
Criticism 2) The argument that objective values are strange ontological beings is not a good argument and reveals strong naturalist presupposition.
Criticism 3) Mackie argues that if objective moral values exists, then they would have to be independent of human thinking. Such an entity is is high implausible, therefore, there are no objective moral values. However McDowell argues that objective moral values do not have to be independent of the mind; they can be like other real and objective ideas that are independent on the mind such as secondary qualities.
Criticism 4) Moorean Shift: This argument begins with the fact that there are objective moral claims, such as boiling children until death, for no reason, is morally wrong.” I begin by noting that there simply are objective moral claims. Second, error theory claims that there are not objective moral claims, therefore, error theory must be wrong.
Criticism • 5) We can also present various criticisms of verification theory: first, verification theory is self-referentially incoherent. It does not pass the verification test, therefore, it must be meaningless and can neither be true nor false. • Second, the verification principle can be interpreted as either empirically verifying things in principle, in which case it would be too broad; or it can be interpreted as empirically verifying propositions in practice, in which case it would be to narrow.
