Reflections on the Mackie Intro Chapter - What non-moralists learn from arguing with moralists

Actually written NOVEMBER 24, 2020

The Mackie introductory chapter [of Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong] echoed my own ideas about arguing for moral skepticism. It is as if Mackie and I had learned the same lessons from arguing with moral realists. These lessons are:

1. A thorough argument for moral skepticism will include (and likely must begin with) significant labor in dis-ambiguating and producing a clear understanding of “objective value/categorical imperative”. The premise here is that moral realism rests on a plethora of equivocations, smears and intuition pumps that need untangling. (Pan-deontics will have this stuff quite tangled.)

2. Simply producing a non-ambiguous grasp of “objective value/categorical imperative” goes a long way toward exposing the logical problems with them. Once clearly understood, “objective value/categorical imperative” will be exposed as a bald, unsupportable idea.

3. We moral skeptics will feel the urge to include psychological evidence (or even just plausible speculation) about how and why moral realists engage in the equivocations and smears and intuition pumps. Mere logical analysis seems inadequate. My favorite of these psychological speculations is the observation that moral language is rife with subliminal ambiguity so subtle that it easily accommodates equivocation and smears. Moral realists keep falling prey to this subliminal ambiguity.

But I also wonder whether these “lessons” can be applied to all philosophical arguments. I’m currently skeptical of this. I have not yet noticed my urge to practice these lessons when arguing in other branches of philosophy, at least not as strongly.

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