John Mackie Quotes on Truth

John Mackie’s Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977) and the prior “A Refutation of Morals” (1946) gave late twentieth-century analytic metaethics its most influential statement of moral error theory. The central thesis is that ordinary moral discourse claims to be reporting objective moral facts whose existence the reflective philosophical analysis cannot defend — the queerness of the supposed moral properties on the metaphysical side, and the parallel sociological diversity of actual moral commitments on the empirical side, jointly support the conclusion that the standard moral truth-claims are systematically false. The framework, drawing on Hume’s projectivist-sentimentalist tradition and the analytic moral-philosophical context Mackie inhabited at Oxford, shaped subsequent analytic metaethics through the contemporary moral fictionalism of Richard Joyce and the broader engagement with the metaphysical and epistemological status of moral truth.