Jl Mackie Quotes

Morality is not to be discovered but to be made: we have to decide what moral views to adopt, what moral stands to take.

Different people have irresolvably different views of the good life – not only at different periods of history and in different forms of society, but even in our own culture at the present time.

Men sometimes display active malevolence to one another, but even apart from that they are almost always concerned more with their selfish ends than with helping one another. The function of morality is primarily to counteract this limitation of men's sympathies. We can decide what the content of morality must be by inquiring how this can best be done.

The traditional arguments for the existence of God have been fairly thoroughly criticised by philosophers. But the theologian can, if he wishes, accept this criticism. He can admit that no rational proof of God's existence is possible. And he can still retain all that is essential to his position, by holding that God's existence is known in some other, non-rational way. I think, however, that a more telling criticism can be made by way of the traditional problem of evil. Here it can be shown, not that religious beliefs lack rational support, but that they are positively irrational, that the several parts of the essential theological doctrine are inconsistent with one another, so that the theologian can maintain his position as a whole only by a much more extreme rejection of reason than in the former case. He must now be prepared to believe, not merely what cannot be proved, but what can be disproved from other beliefs that he also holds.

The argument from design, therefore, can be sustained only with the help of a supposedly a priori double-barrelled principle, that mental order (at least in a god) is self-explanatory, but that all material order not only is not self-explanatory, but is positively improbable and in need of further explanation...this double-barrelled principle is recognizable as the core of the cosmological argument...The argument will not take us even as far as Kant seems to allow without borrowing the a priori thesis that there is a vicious metaphysical contingency in all natural things, and, in contrast with this, the 'transcendental' concept of a god who is self-explanatory and necessarily existent. It is only with the help of these borrowings that the design argument can introduce the required asymmetry, that any natural explanation uses data which call for further explanation, but that the theistic explanation terminates the regress. Without this asymmetry, the design argument cannot show that there is any need to go beyond the sort of hypothesis that Hume foreshadowed and that Wallace and Darwin supplied... The dependence of the argument for design on the ideas that are the core of the cosmological one is greater than Kant realized.

For any individual a good life will be made up largely of the effective pursuit of activities that he finds worthwhile, either intrinsically, or because they are directly beneficial to others about whom he cares, or because he knows them to be instrumental in providing the means of wellbeing for himself and those closely connected to him. Egoism and self-referential altruism will together characterize, to a large extent, both his actions and his motives.

The happiness with which I am, inevitably, most concerned is my own, and next that of those who are in some way closely related to me. Indeed, for any reasonably benevolent person these cannot be separated: he will find much of his own happiness in the happiness of those for whom he cares, or in what he and they do together, where the enjoyment of each contributes so essentially to that of the other(s) that it will be more natural to say 'We had a good. . .' (whatever it was) than to speak of a mere sum of individual enjoyments.

But the altruism that thus forms part of the good life is self-referential. Confined generosity, in Hume's phrase, is what we can expect and all that we can reasonably hope for.

Of course there can be, and there plainly is, cooperation of many sorts that extends far beyond the range of self-referential altruism. It is the main function of any economic system to produce cooperation that is quite independent of affection or goodwill, and it is one function of political organizations to maintain conditions in which this is possible. But if we accept the centrality of self-love and confined generosity, we must, as a corollary, accept competition and some degree of conflict between individuals and between groups.

The alternative to universalism is not an extreme individualism. Any possible, and certainly any desirable, human life is social.

Within any circle, large or small, we must expect and accept not only some cooperation but also some competition and conflict, but different kinds and degrees of these in circles of different size.

Each individual is linked not only to his biological ancestors but also to traditions of activity and information and thought and belief and value; nearly all of what anyone most distinctively and independently is he owes to many others. The taking over and passing on – with perhaps some changes – of a cultural inheritance is itself a part of the good life, and this too is a social relation to which there belong appropriate sorts of conflict as well as cooperation.

We want people to see it as not only legitimate but right and proper that they should pursue what they see as their own well-being.

To say that someone has a right, of whatever sort, is to speak either of or within some legal or moral system: our rejection of objective values carries with it the denial that there are any self-subsistent rights.

The ownership of property is itself a cluster of rights. It is not simple and absolute: it has to be determined what the 'owner' can and cannot do with various sorts of property.

Indeed there is a strong general cases, founded on the legitimacy of a considerable degree of egoism and self-referential altruism, and connected with what I have offered as the basic case for rights as the essential device for securing areas for the free pursuit of happiness, in favour of some private property. This is one point among many where our grounds for dissatisfaction with at least the cruder forms of utilitarianism have practical consequences. 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 genral 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.

If we turn from the individual ownership of property to the occupation of territory by national groups much the same applies. The Norwegian people, say, have a right to continue to occupy and control the territory known as Norway; but that they have this right is not a consequence of any absolute law of nature but an uncontroversial application of principles to which national groups commonly appeal and which they are usually ready to recognize by allowing claims made in terms of them by other national groups.

Notoriously, there are disputed territories – for example, border areas and regions occupied by groups which are not independent nations, but many of whose members wish that they were. Again, there are territories like that which used to be called Palestine; here the principles which in the case of Norway point univocally to one national group as that to which the area belongs diverge, some supporting the claims of the Israelis and others the claims of the Palestinian Arabs. Cyprus and Northern Ireland are two other obvious examples of conflicting prima facie rights of distinguishable national groups. In such cases the appeal, by both parties to a dispute, to supposedly absolute rights is disastrous. It reduces the readiness to negotiate and compromise, and it seems to justify any atrocities against the enemy, and any resulting losses and suffering for one's own side, that are needed to vindicate those rights.

The only approach to these intractable problems that is at all hopeful is to acknowledge the reality and the probable persistence of the conflict of aims, to try to get both parties to recognize their conflicting prima facie rights as such, and to look for a solution which can be seen as a reasonable compromise between these prima facie rights, and which can therefore be defended morally, not merely politically, in the court of international opinion in terms of principles which are already recognized and confidently relied upon in uncontroversial cases.

Hardly any part of anyone's conduct concerns only himself.

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.

On an assumption that the normal and proper state of affairs is that people should live as members of various circles, larger and smaller, with different kinds and degrees of cooperation, competition, and conflict in these different circles, the appropriateness of telling the truth becomes disputable. Truth-telling naturally. goes along with cooperation; it is not obviously reasonable to tell the truth to a competitor or an enemy.

It is now utterly impossible for human nature to go on subsisting unless there are some limits to aggression between states.

If we admire and enjoy the flourishing of human life, we shall naturally delight also in the flourishing of animal life. The prominence of this factor will affect the kind of concern we have for animals. Wild animals suffer pain and inflict pain on one another in the ordinary course of the struggle for survival; we may sympathize with this suffering, but any attempt to interfere is likely to do more harm than good. We can do more about the suffering that human beings cause to wild animals directly, when they hunt them for food or for sport; but even this may well be seen as less important than the suffering they cause indirectly, through pollution. With domesticated animals it is perhaps factory farming that involves the greatest impoverishment of life, but there are many other forms of cruelty, including frivolous 'scientific' tests and experiments.

Mankind is not an agent; it has no unity of decision; it is therefore not confronted with any choices.

Today the scale has changed again: we can no longer share Hobbes's assumption that it is only civil wars that are really a menace, that international wars do relatively little harm.

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. The making and keeping of promises and bargains is a device that makes possible mutually beneficial cooperation between people whose motives are mainly selfish, where the contributions of the different parties need to be made at different times.

The denial of objective values can carry with it an extreme emotional reaction, a feeling that nothing matters at all, that life has lost its purpose. Of course this does not follow; the lack of objective values is not a good reason for abandoning subjective concern or for ceasing to want anything. But the abandonment of a belief in objective values can cause, at least temporarily, a decay of subjective concern and sense of purpose.

The statement that a certain decision is . . . just or unjust will not be objectively prescription: in so far as it can be simply true it leaves open the question whether there is any objective requirement to do what is just and to refrain from what is unjust, and equally leaves open the practical decision to act either way. Recognizing the objectivity of justice in relation to standards, and of evaluative judgments relative to standards, then, merely shifts the question of the objectivity of values back to the standards themselves.

A morality in the broad sense would be a general, all-inclusive theory of conduct: the morality to which someone subscribed would be whatever body of principles he allowed ultimately to guide or determine his choices of action. In the narrow sense, a morality is a system of a particular sort of constraints on conduct — ones whose central task is to protect the interests of persons other than the agent and which present themselves to an agent as checks on his natural inclinations or spontaneous tendencies to act. In this narrow sense, moral considerations would be considerations from some limited range, and would not necessarily include everything that a man allowed to determine what he did. In the second sense, someone could say quite deliberately, 'I admit that morality requires that I should do such-and-such, but I don't intend to: for me other considerations here overrule the moral ones.

Our sense of justice,' whether it is just yours and mine, or that of some much larger group, has no authority over those who dissent from its recommendations or even over us if we are inclined to change our minds.

Disagreement about moral codes seems to reflect people's adherence to and participation in different ways of life. The causal connections seems to be mainly that way round: it is that people approve of monogamy because they participate in a monogamous way of life rather than that they participate in a monogamous way of life because they approve of monogamy.

The argument from relativity has as its premiss the well-known variation in moral codes from one society to another and from one period to another, and also the differences in moral beliefs between different groups and classes within a complex community. Such variation is in itself merely a truth of descriptive morality, a fact of anthropology which entails neither first order nor second order ethical views. Yet is may indirectly support second order subjectivism: radical differences between first order moral judgments make it difficult to treat those judgments as apprehensions of objective truths.

What I have called moral scepticism is a negative doctrine, not a positive one: it says what there isn't, not what there is.

It is simply an error, though no doubt an attractive and inspiring one, to suppose that there is one evil — capitalism, say, or colonialism — the destruction of which would make everything in the garden lovely.

Conflicts of interest are real, inevitable, and ineradicable. There is no question of doing away with them, but it is increasingly important that they should be limited and contained.

Mutual toleration might be easier to achieve if groups could realize that the ideals which determine their moralities in the broad sense are just that, the ideals of those who adhere to them, not objective values which impose requirements on all alike.

On our view of morality we can defend only nearly absolute principles.

Though we admit that the way to hell may be paved with good intentions, we are very sure that the way to heaven is not paved with bad ones.

Life is, fortunately, not a continuous application of game theory.