Ethics Quotes

“the abandonment of a belief in objective values can cause, at least temporarily, a decay of subjective concern and sense of purpose. That it does so is evidence that the people in whom this reaction occurs 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.”
― John Leslie Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“There are no objective values.”
― John Leslie Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“The facts have to be determined by empirical evidence, and our thinking has then to conform to the facts, not the facts to our thinking”
― John Leslie Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“The difficulty of seeing how values could be objective is a fairly strong reason for thinking that they are not so”
― John Leslie Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“So far as ethics is concerned, my thesis that there are no objective values is specifically the denial that any such categorically imperative element is objectively valid.”
― John Leslie Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“Morality is not to be discovered but to be made: we have to decide what moral views to adopt, what moral stands to take.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“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.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“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.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“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.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“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.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“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.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“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.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“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.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“Mankind is not an agent; it has no unity of decision; it is therefore not confronted with any choices.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“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.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“It is now utterly impossible for human nature to go on subsisting unless there are some limits to aggression between states.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“Life is, fortunately, not a continuous application of game theory.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“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.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“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.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“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.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“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.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“What I have called moral scepticism is a negative doctrine, not a positive one: it says what there isn't, not what there is.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“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.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“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.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“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.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“On our view of morality we can defend only nearly absolute principles.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“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.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“The alternative to universalism is not an extreme individualism. Any possible, and certainly any desirable, human life is social.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“the weather is such as I would favour if I were a potato-grower – or, more dubiously, if I were a potato.”
― John Leslie Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“The claim that values are not objective, are not part of the fabric of the world, is meant to include not only moral goodness, which might be most naturally equated with moral value, but also other things that could be more loosely called moral values or disvalues—rightness and wrongness, duty, obligation, an action’s being rotten and contemptible, and so on. It also includes non-moral values, notably aesthetic ones, beauty and various kinds of artistic merit.”
― John Leslie Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong