Evidence · Case 05 · Relativism

Error theory, as in J. L. Mackie

One exhibit from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.

The error theorist says a moral judgment does claim to describe an objective fact, but that no such facts exist, so every positive moral claim is, strictly speaking, false. The philosopher J. L. Mackie gave the classic statement of this in “Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong,” explicitly distinguishing it from subjectivism: the problem is not that people mistake taste for fact, but that the facts moral language purports to describe do not exist.

Sources

J. L. Mackie, “Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong” (opens in a new tab)
J. L. Mackie, “Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong” (Penguin, 1977)

Objections & responses

Error theory isn’t subjectivism. Mackie explicitly distinguished them. Doesn’t the “that’s just reporting feelings” reply answer a different view than the one Mackie held?: Correct, and the two should be kept apart. Error theory says moral claims aim at objective facts and all of them fail, because there are no such facts. The right response is not that’s just your feelings but this requires you to say that torturing a child for fun is not really wrong, and no one can believe that. Mackie himself conceded that his view is deeply counterintuitive and defended it on the grounds that objective values would be metaphysically queer, unlike anything else in the universe. The theist’s reply is that queerness is only a problem if the universe is fundamentally impersonal, which is the point in dispute.

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