The error theory: do ordinary moral judgements assert an objective prescriptivity that nothing in the world answers to?

J. L. Mackie, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Ordinary moral judgements claim objective prescriptivity.1 They represent wrongness as a feature of the act, there in the world, which would give anyone who saw it a reason to refrain regardless of what he wanted. That is what they mean; the analyses which explain the claim away are linguistically false to the discourse. And there is nothing in the world of that kind. So the judgements are systematically false.2345

Sources

  1. Is it equally forceful if applied to the terms in which everyday moral judgements are more likely to be expressed — though still, as has been argued in Section 7, with a claim to objectivity - 'you must do this', 'you can't do that', 'obligation', 'unjust', 'rotten', 'disgraceful', 'mean', or talk about good reasons for or against possible actions?
    Ethics, Inventing Right and Wrong, p. 39
  2. As a matter of argument, I can, I think, show that I am not guilty of any logical inconsistency in holding to the above interpretation of ethics and at the same time expressing strong ethical preferences, But in feeling I am not satisfied. But he concludes, reasonably enough, with the remark: 'I can only say that, while my own opinions as to ethics do not satisfy me, other people's satisfy me still less.
    Ethics, Inventing Right and Wrong, p. 32
  3. A wrong action is intrinsically forbidden because it is harmful from the point of view of the universe, and it calls for a hostile response because it is both harmful generally and intrinsically forbidden. It might be thought that this analysis makes redundant the vain search in which we have been engaged for some way of making moral sense of positive retributivism.
    Persons and Values, Selected Papers Vol II, p. 225
  4. Thus 'whoever acts as if things were so, or not so, doth by his acts declare that they are so, or not so; as plainly as he could by words, and with more reality' (279).
    Hume's Moral Theory, pp. 26–27
  5. For example, I feel love or esteem for a man who seems to be exerting himself in a good cause; but the feeling changes if I am persuaded that he was bribed, or 'acted from some mercenary or bad motive' (917). But again Reid's appeal is simply to our introspective view of what we are doing when we judge morally.
    Hume's Moral Theory, pp. 147–148

Where the argument is made

  • Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), ch. 1, especially §§1-9 on moral scepticism, the argument from relativity and the argument from queerness
  • "A Refutation of Morals" (1946), reprinted in Persons and Values

How the argument was received

One of the most attacked positions in contemporary metaethics, and one that has outlived most of its attackers.