J. L. Mackie
1917-1981 · Analytic Ethics · Known
Mackie was an Oxford philosopher who gave moral scepticism its sharpest form. Every claim that something is right or wrong comes out false, he held, because such claims report objective demands built into the world, and no such demands exist. Values of that kind would be queer items, unlike anything else we know of, and cultures disagree about them in ways that look like invention.
Signature
The position Mackie is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Truth
- leans Objective
- Good and Evil
- Social Invention
Positions on the 7 axes the sources answer
- Natural Processes
- strongly leans Mechanistic (4 on a 0–100 scale from Mechanistic to Purposeful)
- Society
- mildly leans Individualism (62 on a 0–100 scale from Collectivism to Individualism)
- Beauty
- strongly leans Subjective (4 on a 0–100 scale from Subjective to Objective)
- Meaning
- strongly leans Constructed (5 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Ground of Being
- strongly leans Immanence (0 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
- Truth
- leans Objective (84 on a 0–100 scale from Subjective to Objective)
- Conviction
- leans Uncertain (25 on a 0–100 scale from Uncertain to Certain)
13 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Mackie refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Atheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Highest Good
- Other
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Social Invention
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - Perception
- Indirect Realism
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Sense Experience
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Social Contract
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Compatibilism
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Beginning of Things
- Eternal Cosmos
What is the origin of reality? - Authority
- Consent of the Governed
What is the legitimate source of authority? - Language
- Representation
What is the fundamental nature of language? - Law
- Social Contract
What is the ultimate source of legitimate law? - Death
- Annihilation
What happens at death? - Human Nature
- Evolved Animal
What is human nature?