MACKIE'S ERROR THEORY

In Chapter 1 of Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (hereafter E), John Mackie makes two claims: firstly, that we ordinarily conceive of values as “objectively prescriptive” features of the world, and, secondly, that, as a matter of fact, the world contains no such features. Central to Mackie's discussion is thus the relationship between a conceptual claim and an ontological claim. It is because our concept of value is the concept of an objective and prescriptive feature of the world, and thus a part of our ontology, that we can make the ontological claim that nothing like that figures in our ontology. Mackie thus adopts an “error theory” about moral value. Our moral thought embodies a commitment to evaluative realism but, in being so committed, we are in error.

In “Values and Secondary Qualities” (hereafter VASQ), John McDowell offers a potentially devastating critique of Mackie's error theory. He argues that Mackie ascribes to common sense a conception of the objectivity of values that makes the idea of an objectively prescriptive value incoherent, and obviously so – no surprise, according to McDowell, that there is nothing like that in our ontology. McDowell thinks that we should therefore be suspicious of Mackie's claim that common sense has such a conception of value; better to think that, according to common sense, values are objective in a rather different sense.