Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right And Wrong

This brings us to our next challenge, that of morals existing only for those with the capacity to act morally. There may seem like an obvious answer, namely that, of course only those with the ability to rationalize can be rational. It’s like saying that only dogs can bark, obviously a dog that can’t bark is still a dog. What then is the quality that gives it its name? What makes a human? The moral argument falls as such, if humans have objective morally responsibilities. People who cannot do these responsibilities (such as mentally challenged individuals) are not morally obligated to objective moral principles. Thus, these kinds of people are subhuman. This may seem like an immoral conclusion and stark contradiction to our concept (albeit …show more content…
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. Correspondingly, if we were aware of them, it would have to be by some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else” (Mackie, “Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong” L.494), this is Mackie’s argument from queerness. Simply put, the argument is such that, a “synthetic a priori” claim, would by definition be understood through reason alone. This would be a truthful term in the same way a mathematical term is truthful. The rules of reason would dictate that 2+2=4, but the rules of reason can draw no parallel between the action and its value. Mackie says, “The kinds of behavior to which moral values and disvalues are ascribed are indeed part of the furniture of the world, and so are the natural, descriptive, differences between them; but not, perhaps, their differences in value.” (Mackie, “Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong” L.154). A reasoning that would be able to draw such conclusions would be a “queer” within its parameters and our ability to use it. We have yet to understand such a reasoning and as such a reasonable person would never attempt to make such claims that are beyond …show more content…
Whilst there are many theories as to where the concept of good and evil originated. Everyone will agree that it has come about, and most societies have a concept of right and wrong. And as we discussed earlier, there is the fact that as humans, we pursue pleasure and avoid pain. Morality must then have originated to help us accomplish the goal of happiness, and the only way these morals would remain is if they continued to do so (this is why universally accepted morals have changed or have evolved over time). If we were to examine any claim and attempt to find its motivation, we would find none, save that it “…depends on some internal sense or feeling, which nature has made universal in the whole” (Hume,” An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals” L.89). They would be “something that eighteenth-century writers would put under the head of passion or sentiment.” (Mackie, “Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong” L.243). As Hume said, “Take any action allow’d to be vicious: Willful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. In which-ever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object. You never can find it,