J.L. Mackie: The Subjectivity of Values
The following is a summary and critique of J.L. Mackie’s “The Subjectivity of Values,” an absolute MUST-READ for anyone interested in ethics. As the professor who graded the original version of this adequately pointed out, I addressed the Mackie’s relativity argument but not so much the queerness argument.
In “The Subjectivity of Values,” a chapter in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, J.L. Mackie develops his theory of “moral scepticism.” In the first sentence, he states his thesis plainly: “there are no objective values.” He goes on to fully define his position, by clarifying the sense in which he means it: that there do not exist in the world any such values. Though Mackie’s moral scepticism is a strong explanation for the failure of theories which posit values that are intrinsic features of the universe, such theories do not account for all theories which hold objective values; in short, not all objective theories are of the kind that Mackie describes and critiques.
Initial Discussion
Mackie spends the first portion of the chapter emphasizing a critical set of distinctions to understand his argument: namely, that his theory is not a first-order (normative) form of subjectivism or scepticism, but a second-order (metaethically descriptive) one. For example, his position is not one of a moral skeptic who would argue that we ought to reject all conventional moral judgments (and thus make a positive, first-order statement about morality). Likewise, he is sure to distinguish between other second-order theses and his own. Subjectivist theories such as emotivism attempt to provide an explanation for what constitutes moral speech. An emotivist would argue that all moral speech is merely an instance of the speaker expressing his own attitude toward the subject (“stealing is wrong” means “boo for stealing!”) In contrast, Mackie is simply describing the nature of normative statements and their respective ontological projections (or lack thereof). “Moral scepticism” is concerned with saying what does not exist, as opposed to what does; it is a negative, as opposed to a positive, doctrine.
Mackie does hold that there are clear factual descriptions of acts which we commonly ascribe to moral actions: “the present issue is with regard to the objectivity specifically of value, not with regard to the objectivity of those natural, factual differences on the basis of which differing values are assigned.” In other words, kindness and cruelty can be described in totally non-normative terms; they simply are different classes of behavior to which moral values are commonly attached. However, value statements like “killing is wrong” are not propositional (true or false) like “three plus seven is ten” or “the earth is flat.” The only exception is when there is an agreed upon standard of value (in a sense, an implicit transformation of a hypothetical imperative) for the subject of such a statement. For example, if it were agreed that a good ethics class is one which has a lecture on subjectivism and Hauptli’s ethics class did not have one, then the statement “Hauptli’s ethics class is good” has a truth-value (false). Morality can thus be derived from standards of evaluation, but Mackie argues that appealing to a standard of evaluation simply shifts the question posed by his scepticism to the standard.
The Arguments from Relativity and Queerness
After his introductory discussion, Mackie’s theory branches into two primary sections: the argument from relativity, and the argument from queerness. The argument from relativity begins from a point about the obvious historical variations in the content of moral beliefs across groups, classes, and societies. Of course, the presence of disagreement does not disprove the existence of objective value, just as disagreement does not disprove objective scientific facts. However, scientific disagreement relies on differences in speculative inferences and explanatory hypotheses based on gathered evidence, to which moral disagreement does not have any claim. On the contrary, moral dissimilarity is more indicative of adherence to different ways of living. The causal connection is reversed: people approve of monogamy because they live monogamously, not the other way around. “Universalizable” or other general, basic principles not only come about because of widespread implicit acceptance, but individually because of the strength of one’s response to it, despite the fact that others may respond quite differently.
The argument from queerness itself has two parts, one metaphysical, and one epistemological. Its metaphysical claim, in summary, is that objective values would be radically different from anything in our experience; “if there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.” In turn, the crux of its epistemological claim is that there would be no way to know these queer things without a special, non-empirical means of knowing them (intuition). The central idea of intuitionism, which is that there is some specific and unique interface with which humans come to realize objective moral values, is thus the logical reduction of all theories of objective values. At some point in these theories, some essential concept or inference will only be known via intuition, thus committing any consistent objectivist theory to a “lame answer” to this problem.
Mackie cites Plato’s Theory of Forms as an extreme example of what an objective moral theory entails. Either objective goods have “to-be-pursuedness” built into them, or situations must somehow have a demand for a specific kind of action. Because of this queerness, Mackie questions the connection between an action and a value, and how, if it were to exist, humans could know it. The wrongness of an action must somehow be “consequential” or “supervenient” upon the action; thus, if the natural class of an action is deliberate cruelty, it must be wrong because it is a piece of deliberate cruelty, to which Mackie inquires, “but just what in the world is signified by this ‘because’?” Whatever it is must be beyond the realm of empirical observation, to which the only intrinsicist response is to find “companions in guilt”: identity, number, the infinite extension of time and space, among other things for which empiricism allegedly can not account. Mackie properly acknowledges that the only valid approach to this objection is by providing empirical accounts of such things, and applying the argument from queerness to those “supposed metaphysical necessities” which cannot be explained.
Critique
It is evident that Mackie’s argument is guilty of a straw-man fallacy, or, at least, of incompleteness. At first glance, it may appear that Plato’s Theory of Forms is used as a straw-depiction of utilitarianism, Kantianism, and other objective moral systems. Indeed, he acknowledges that few philosophers actually believe in the Forms. Nonetheless, as Mackie cites it, Plato’s theory is actually appropriately representative of those systems. He makes two implicit assumptions about objective moral theories: first, that if they are to have objective values, that these values must have an existence in reality as objects or relations have existence; second, that knowledge of such objective values compels the agent to comply. Seeing that, the actual shortcoming of Mackie’s argument is much more subtle: he is essentially claiming that all objective moral theories must possess these properties.
As will be seen, that is clearly not the case. While the following discussion can be construed as a debate resolved by clarifying definitions, the misinterpretation of definitions which Mackie does not clarify may lead to misinterpretations of the implications of his argument. The definition at hand here, of course, is that of “objective value.” If Mackie presupposes that it comes with a Platonic conception attached (the two implicit assumptions listed above), then his argument is unproblematic, but it fails to account for all “objective” moral theories. For the remainder of the discussion, we can understand “objective moral theories” to mean sets of propositions about morality that are true through time, regardless of whether agents believe that they are true, false, or meaningless. What Mackie has successfully refuted is only a subset of the above, that is, he has only challenged those theories which hold values as features of the inanimate universe.
Though ultimately inadequate, Mackie’s argument from queerness offers some valid insight. It is true that there is no logical necessity linking actions with values of the fantastical kind to which Mackie is actually referring. To better illustrate, take the case of any hypothetical imperative: it begins with a conditional “if,” and then a prescribed course of action to best fulfill that condition. The first part sets the desired factual state of affairs, and the second part describes the physical action required to best achieve it. Thus, when an action takes place, a direct connection can be drawn to the corresponding hypothetical value, which is brought about by the achievement of a standard. Suppose the imperative, “if one wants to get an ‘A’ in ethics, he ought to do his final paper.” Then, when Chris does his paper, his action can be linked to the fulfillment of the goal of Chris having an ‘A’ appear on his transcript. Both parts of the statement pertain to material cause and effect, which can be observed and predicted scientifically (i.e., rationally). Suppose, on the other hand, the imperative, “Chris ought to do his final paper (because it is good/his duty/etc.)” If it is true, when Chris does his paper, his action achieves a good- not a good to him, or for him, but a good in itself. How does he know which actions best bring about that good in the first place, if this good simply occurs with no tangible effect upon him? This, in light of Mackie’s argument, is a very difficult question to answer. In contrast, so long as an imperative is conditional, the link between an action and a respective value is quite clear.
The next question leads ultimately to the defectiveness of moral scepticism: must a value be unconditional or categorical in order to be objective? The argument from queerness incorporates the assumption about the impossible kind of “entity or object or relation” that an objective value must be. Mackie’s faulty epistemology may be part of the problem. In particular, objectivity does not necessarily imply intrinsicality. A concept, for example, does not represent some intrinsic feature of the universe, but only comes about as the product of a particular process of integration of sensory information. Likewise, values are not an intrinsic part of reality. For value to exist at all there must be a valuator- an agent- to impose a standard on what is otherwise an indifferent universe. Things are good to agents, for the sake of attaining some goal; they are not simply good in themselves. Put differently, reality comes before morality. Prior to all good and evil, there must be a world of things that can become good, evil, or neither. In that regard, value is conditional: it predicates on the existence of agents who have some standard for the material state of affairs.
Our next concern is what makes these conditional values objective. First, we must ponder the exact notion of value. With no need to assert psychological egoism, we can say that all human action is disposed toward the pursuit of value (subjective or objective), whether it is in seeking worldly pleasures, peace of mind, good conscience, or a healthy soul, and whether these actions are self- or other-oriented. Consider value as a means by which things can be preferred over others; in essence, how an agent values something will affect how he acts in order to attain or keep it. The objectivity of such values arises from the fact that agents, specifically humans, possess a physical nature that generates the material basis for a standard of evaluation, from which “the good” is generated. The presence of the fundamental alternatives of existence or nonexistence (“to be or not to be”) is a necessary precursor of value for humans.[1] Without some fundamental alternative, an agent’s course of action would have no purpose and thus no value, if he would even act at all.
Value, then, is derived from a system of conditional imperatives that reduce to the fundamental alternatives and the respective facts pertaining to them. If one wants to live, he ought to eat; if one wants to eat, he ought to produce food; if one wants to produce food, he ought to learn about agriculture, gathering, or hunting, etc. Because the achievement of prolonged existence or one of its corollaries is the achievement of a material state, there is a consistent and empirically-derived basis for resolving the content of the latter portion of conditional imperatives. In this sense, values are objective; they can not be achieved consistently by arbitrary whim.
Without any further elaboration, Mackie’s argument from relativity will pose a problem for the objectivity of value. One could simply argue that there was never a contention in the first place that the optimal fulfillment of hypothetical imperatives was not a matter of objective fact- that it is only the content of the “if” portions of the imperatives that lend themselves to subjectivity, and this is our concern. The problem with this assertion is that it ignores the essential commonality among human beings. In one way, relativity has merit: if you want to grow food in Italy, grow wheat; if you want to grow food in Ireland, grow potatoes. These are two different “ways” of life, both of which can be correct. However, those statements are merely higher-order expressions of the basic imperative, “if you want to live, eat,” which is one of the many imperatives relating to the agent’s relationship to the fundamental outcomes of existence versus non-existence. In other words, by their being what they are, humans are committed to the conditional imperative “if you are human, and if you want to live, satisfy your physical needs.”[2] The chief difference between a condition such as “if you desire a grade of ‘A’” and “if you are human” is that the products of the latter have claim to objectivity, because the agent does not choose it, whether as an end or a means to an end; it is only a fact given by nature. The result is the existence of an objective value which is not intrinsic, but is logically dependent on the presence of humankind.
In the end, Mackie’s argument for the subjectivity of values makes a strong case against the existence of intrinsic values. He draws attention to several important inconsistencies and difficulties encountered by the philosophical daydreams of Platonic ideals, intrinsic values, and others of their conceptual family. Nevertheless, his argument is insufficient as proof for the subjectivity of values across different agents of the same kind (humans, as the only relevant case). In summation, consider the following hypothetical imperatives: if you are looking for an unambiguous explanation of why the concept of intrinsic value is metaphysically and epistemologically bizarre, read Mackie’s “The Subjectivity of Values”; if you are looking for a normative validation of a moral free-for-all, read Gilbert Harman’s “Moral Relativism Defended” instead; if you are looking for proof that objective values do not exist, you must extend your search a bit farther than Mackie’s limited, albeit excellent, article.
Source:
Mackie, J.L. “The Subjectivity of Values” In Ethical Theory: Classical and Contemporary Readings, edited by Louis Pojman, 446-456. Belmont: Wadsworth, 2002.
[1] In this essay I am speaking about a very specific counter-example to Mackie’s claims; it is conceivable that someone could argue for other kinds of objective values that are not intrinsic (such as a collective “that is good which contributes to human prosperity”)
[2] “What if I don’t want to live?” is a question that merits some serious discussion beyond the scope of this paper. My summarized response is that life is a necessary precondition for all possible values that follow. One who does not want to live constitutes one who has chosen to reject interaction with reality, which cannot be replaced by something else.
