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This chapter discusses the philosophies of Harman and Mackie with a view to highlighting six claims of central concern: (1) whether issues of objectivity should be raised ‘reflexively’ at the meta-level of enquiry; (2) whether the best account of objectivity will essentially vindicate itself in its own terms; (3) the reducibility of moral properties figuring in moral explanations; (4) whether moral explanations are ever the best explanations of belief; (5) the appropriateness in this context of a causal theory of knowledge; and (6) whether the concepts deployed in morality are to a certain extent local or perspectival in the sense of tied in to our particular sensibilities. It is argued that the framework of minimalism about truth is the best way of prosecuting debates over objectivity.

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.

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.

There is often thought to be an asymmetry between belief and desire, such that belief is more rational than desire, or possessed of cognitive content that desire lacks. In this chapter, it is argued that this sort of asymmetry thesis is difficult to sustain when beliefs and desires are thought of as propositional attitudes. The most common arguments for the asymmetry view all depend upon a problematic form of epistemic foundationalism. When this sort of foundationalism is rejected, there is no reason to treat desires, or preferences more generally, as less susceptible to rational deliberation and control than beliefs.

Chapter 2 focuses on moral knowledge and examines the epistemic component of autonomy that supports a cognitivist, objectivist, and Kantian realist interpretation of right. The argument is set up against contemporary challenges to the very idea of moral knowledge. It addresses two main questions: how we know right and wrong, and how we can justify such knowledge on Kantian grounds. The central moral concept discussed in this chapter is ‘right’; that is, a ‘thin’ concept that captures core features of Kant’s term of art ‘duty’. It is shown that ‘right’ is knowable and that propositions that contain it are true without the need to refer to any facts. In his universalizability formulation, Kant gives a definition of ‘right’ that is also at the same time a test for ‘rightness’. It is argued that Kant adduces epistemic support for the formulation from analysis of ordinary moral ideas, whereas justification follows an a priori path. The a priori justificatory procedure, as reconstructed here, offers us an insight into the practical employment Kant envisages for pure reason.

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.”

Modern ethical naturalism has the challenge of showing how normativity, broadly speaking, is a feature of the natural world—a description, roughly, acceptable in the language of modern natural science. The concept of dào can be used in expressing a positivist traditionalism, social or rational constructivism, or emotivism, among other positions, as well as naturalism. This chapter refines claims about the overall role and value of a concept in normative language that functions as dào does. It discusses Mackie's queerness objection to ethical naturalism and briefly illustrates how it envisions dào-like concepts dispelling it. The chapter also argues that normative claims explicated in natural dào terms would not seem as strange, particularly given other salient features of Chinese normative vocabulary. Furthermore, it briefly sketches a picture of the larger gradations in plausible naturalistic stories illustrating continuity in the emergence of normative from natural dàos.

Many philosophers maintain that common sense is committed to a kind of moral objectivism. This chapter exploits recent empirical work to defend this claim. The chapter also maintains that the account of moral judgment developed in the volume contributes to a familiar Humean argument against moral objectivism. However, even if the commonsense commitment to moral objectivity is wrong, that does not immediately lead to an “error theory” according to which all commonsense moral judgments are false since they all presuppose objectivity. Rather, there are fundamental questions in the philosophy of mind that need to be settled before we can determine whether error theory follows. In any case, recent evidence suggests that many of the central characteristics of moral judgment can be preserved in the absence of a commitment to objectivity.

I argue that non-naturalism is the core of Sidgwick's metaethical position; that it represents a fundamental commitment of his, in that he draws from it epistemological implications central to his own distinctive ethical views; that his case for it is better than Moore's more famous case, in Principia 1, and reflects a proper estimation of the way to argue for non-naturalism; that there is an interesting route from Sidgwick to error theory, of which Mackie was aware; and that these claims together mean Sidgwick's work deserves much more attention and recognition in metaethics than it has hitherto received.

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.

This chapter defends our pre-philosophical commitment to moral objectivism. It is an essential prelude to the main argument, for it establishes the standard which the rest of the book will use to determine which secular accounts are ‘sufficiently’ objective. The chapter defends two distinct claims. The first is that in their practical deliberation, all human beings seek to approximate a truth which goes beyond their sentiments or the conventions of their culture. The second is that this quest is not in vain: which is to say, that humans have some capacity to attune their beliefs more closely to that moral truth, when they honestly and carefully seek it out. It draws on arguments made by David Enoch, Ronald Dworkin and Roger Crisp, and considers the case against moral realism presented by John Mackie.

In this, his first philosophical publication, McGinn introduces a distinction between epistemic possibility and metaphysical possibility, in order to diagnose the reason for Mackie's misinterpretation of Kripke's essentialism about natural kinds. McGinn then argues—on behalf of Kripke and pace Mackie—that the secondary qualities of natural kind substances (e.g. gold, water) are rigidly identical to the underlying primary qualities.

McGinn contests Mackie's reductive explanation of Kripke's claim that the origin of a thing constitutes a de re necessity (i.e. that a thing's origin is essential to it). On McGinn's non‐reductive alternative, a biological entity's origin is essential because its developmental continuity (e.g. from gametes to zygote to foetus to infant to child to adult) is. Moreover, the necessity of a biological organism's developmental continuity is distinct from the necessity of an artefact's constitution (e.g. this chair's being made of that particular bit of wood).

John Mackie argued that God's perfect goodness is incompatible with his failing to actualize the best world that he can actualize. And God's omnipotence is incompatible with his being unable to actualize a morally perfect world. Mackie was entirely right. If God predicts that every significantly free essence always goes right only if every significantly free essence always freely goes right. But then Mackie's conclusion follows. But the chapter also offers three Impossibility Arguments which show that it is impossible that, necessarily, God actualizes the best possible world or that, necessarily, God actualizes a morally perfect world or that, necessarily, God actualizes a good enough world. The logical problem of evil is necessarily unsound. It is true in every possible world that God can actualize a morally perfect world, but it is false that, necessarily, God can actualize a morally perfect world only if he does actualize a morally perfect world.

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.

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.