Search Results

This chapter discusses attempts to refute theism using premisses which entail that God does not exist. J. L. Mackie's paper “Evil and Omnipotence” (1955) and H. J. McCloskey's book God and Evil (1974) offer such arguments. Other attempts rely on premisses identifying non‐defeasible moral duties applying to all rational agents, including God if he exists. All such premisses are either false or doubtful, unless the argument is reinterpreted as evidential rather than logical.

This chapter discusses Grice's three Carus lectures on value and objectivity, relative and absolute value, and metaphysics and value. The lecture on value and objectivity investigates the conception of value by addressing questions about objectivity in this region and the relation of such questions to questions about scepticism. It considers the ideas of two anti-objectivists: J. L. Mackie and Philippa Foot. The lecture on relative and absolute value considers the assertion that Mackie's denial of objective values that is tantamount to a denial that there are any absolutely action-directing values, despite what may be claimed in ordinary moral judgements. The lecture on metaphysics and value explores the possibility of providing some kind of metaphysical account of, and positive backing for, the notion of value.

Epistemic antirealist views are rarely explicitly formulated. This chapter formulates and engages with the epistemic counterpart to so-called error theories in morality, such as that defended by J. L. Mackie. Epistemic nihilism, as it is termed, is committed to the claim that there are no epistemic facts. It is argued that this type of view yields a radical type of scepticism, according to which there is no reason to believe the view itself or anything else, for that matter.

Ayer has always given the problem of perception a central place in his thinking. The movement of Ayer's own thought has been from phenomenalism to what he describes in his latest treatment of the topic as ‘a sophisticated form of realism’. The epithet is doubly apt. No adequate account of the matter can be simple; and Ayer's account, while distinguished by his accustomed lucidity and economy of style, is notably and subtly responsive to all the complexities inherent in the subject itself and to all the pressures of more or less persuasive argument which have marked the course of its treatment by philosophers. Yet the form of realism he defends has another kind of sophistication about which it is possible to have reservations and doubts. This chapter focuses on some of these doubts and reservations. It draws on Chapters 4 and 5 of The Central Questions of Philosophy, and considers a different kind of realism — that was advocated by J. L. Mackie in his book on Locke. There are points of contact as well as of contrast between Ayer's and Mackie's views. A comparison between them helps to bring out the nature of Strawson's reservations about both.

This chapter argues that John Locke is using the word “person” as a “forensic” term. Udo Thiel notes the sense in which “person” is a property term, a term for a moral quality, in Locke's text. J. L. Mackie suggests that Locke's theory “is...hardly a theory of personal identity at all, but might be better described as a theory of action appropriation.” This is exactly what Locke says himself. In effect, the thing-and-property-blending use of “person” compresses our ordinary notion of a person into the much more specific notion of a person's moral identity, while at the same time insisting on maintaining the idea that the resulting thing is indeed a thing, a person. The chapter explains why “person” “is a forensic term, appropriating actions and their merit.”

This chapter asks to which judgements the error theory applies, what the error theory entails, and whether what the error theory entails can be true. It argues that the error theory does not apply to judgements about standards, but does apply to instrumental normative judgements and judgements about reasons for belief. It then compares the error theory that this book defends to the moral error theories that have been defended by J.L. Mackie, Richard Joyce, and Jonas Olson. The chapter argues that Mackie, Joyce, and Olson underestimate the generality of their own arguments. It ends by arguing that the error theory entails that all normative judgements are false, and that it can be true that all normative judgements are false.

An analysis of three problems for Richard Swinburne’s Bayesian cumulative case strategy in natural theology shows why he needs to shift the burden of proof to the unbeliever. Allegedly, this shift is accomplished by the argument from religious experience, which is based upon the Principle of Credulity and the Principle of Testimony. However, the Principle of Credulity does not apply to religious experiences, and genuine perceptual of-God experiences are impossible. Furthermore, if monotheism were true, most religious experiences (of other gods than God) would be deceptive, so that religious experience in general would be highly unreliable. Swinburne does not succeed to neutralize other defeaters of the argument from religious experience either, so that one cannot shift the burden of proof to unbelievers. It is concluded that Swinburne’s cumulative case for the existence of God fails, and that it is unlikely that anyone else will succeed in arguing convincingly that God exists.

Berkeley's contemporaries commonly held that a thing's qualities belong to it by virtue of inhering in a substance or substratum that is not identical with any of its qualities or any collection of qualities. Locke, who was a reluctant advocate of this substance theory, famously characterized substance/substratum as a “supposed, I know not what” that supports a thing's qualities. In his Principles Berkeley rejected this view as unintelligible, and in the First Dialogue he backed up this rejection with an ingenious infinite-regress argument. This chapter analyzes his critique and offers a step-by-step reconstruction of the regress argument. It argues that although the argument is effective against the substance theory, it does not refute materialism or support idealism because one can believe in matter without accepting the substance theory—one can hold bundle theory. As Bennett has shown, Berkeley conflates the belief in matter with the belief in “material substance.”

The mid-20th century consensus regarding Hume’s critique of reported miracles has broken down dramatically in recent years thanks to the application of probabilistic analysis to the issue and the rediscovery of its history. Progress from this point forward is likely to be made along one or more of three fronts. There is wide room for interdisciplinary collaboration, work that will bring together scholars with expertise in religion, psychology, philosophy, and empirical science. There is a great deal of work still to be done in formal analysis, making use of the tools of modern probability theory to model questions about testimony and inference. And the recovery and study of earlier works on the subject—works that should never have been forgotten—can significantly enrich our understanding of the underlying issues.

Locke’s idea of a substance (e.g., a rock, a tree, or a swan) comprises (1) the ideas of the qualities that define its species, and (2) the idea of a substratum in which those qualities inhere. The proper interpretation of (2) is controversial. The traditional view is that substratum is an unperceivable component distinct from any and all of a thing’s qualities; the rival view is that substratum = real essence. This chapter examines three arguments for the traditional view: the argument from change traceable at least to Aristotle, the logico-linguistic argument discussed by J. L. Mackie, and a subtler argument, implicit in Leibniz, based on the division of labor between the referential words and descriptive words in subject-predicate sentences. It discuses the textual evidence that Locke held the traditional view. It argues that despite that view’s incompatibility with Locke’s Empiricism, he accepts it, albeit with misgivings, because of the latter argument.

Prior formulations of the problem of evil, for example, by J. L. Mackie, William Rowe, and Paul Draper, assume that God must have requiring reasons to prevent evils to creatures, and use that assumption as the basis for claiming that the existence (or types, or amount, or distribution) of evils in this world is either incompatible with or gives strong prima facie evidence against the existence of God. But given that God’s reasons with respect to preventing evils are justifying, not requiring, reasons, no such arguments can get off the ground. This account, which is based on a first-order theory of divine ethics, differs from skeptical theism, which is based on moral epistemology. This difference makes the account developed here immune from the most serious criticisms that have made trouble for skeptical theism.

This paper is concerned with a disagreement between Bernard Williams and John McDowell. It starts by asking what form a dispositional account of value should take. A no-priority view could hold that value is a disposition to elicit a certain response, and the response is to the object as disposed to elicit just that response. But a different no-priority view could talk of meriting a response and responding in the way merited. The response is explained as an instance of things being as they rationally ought to be. The paper debates the merits of such a view, and then turns to ask how much truth there is in the common claim that McDowell is an intuitionist.