J. L. Mackie

Quotes

• “There are no objective values.”
• “The kinds of behaviour 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.”
• “The denial that there are objective values does not commit one to any particular view about what moral statements mean, and certainly not to the view that they are equivalent to subjective reports.”
• “The difficulty of seeing how values could be objective is a fairly strong reason for thinking that they are not so.”
• “In one important sense of the word it is a paradigm case of injustice if a court declares someone to be guilty of an offence of which it knows him to be innocent. More generally, a finding is unjust if it is at variance with what the relevant law and the facts together require, and particularly if it is known by the court to be so.”
• “The abandonment of a belief in objective values can cause...a decay of subjective concern and sense of purpose. That it does so is evidence that...people...have been tending to objectify their concerns and purposes, have been giving them a fictitious external authority. A claim to objectivity has been so strongly associated with their subjective concerns and purposes that the collapse of the former seems to undermine the latter as well.”

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