Mackie

Moral error theorists argue that moral thought and discourse are systematically in error, and that nothing is, or can ever be, morally permissible, required or forbidden. I begin by discussing how error theorists arrive at this conclusion. I then argue that if we accept a moral error theory, we cannot escape a pressing problem – what should we do next, metaethically speaking? I call this problem the ‘what now?’ problem, or WNP for short. I discuss the attempts others have made to respond to the WNP, and in each case I show that the responses fail to be satisfying. I then propose a new response to the WNP, which I call revolutionary relativism. I define revolutionary relativism, explain why it is preferable to the existing responses to the WNP, and defend it against the most problematic objections I anticipate that opponents might raise. I conclude that revolutionary relativism succeeds where previous WNP responses fail, and that if we accept a moral error theory, we should become revolutionary relativists.

Another Compilation of Informations in which the overall objective is to carefully draw attention to our ever-changing universe in which we exist in, and how to make notice of these astronomical observations in changes as how they relate to subsequent changes made at the quantum or even nuclear level.

Thank you to the internet for the very real informations being transgressed allowing me to learn, create, and transmit such informations.

Many proponents of the Abrahamic religions assume that the Theory of Evolution is ipso facto opposed to religion, and therefore, since religion derives from scripture, which is the divinely inspired word of an infallible God, the Theory of Evolution must be false. This paper argues that not only is this view incorrect, but that religion can be helped by accepting the Theory of Evolution. The paper will present a specific variety of the Problem of Evil known as Rowe’s ‘E2’, and try to show why existing responses to it fail. The paper argues, however, that Rowe’s E2 can be answered by the Theory of Evolution.

My aim in this paper is to critically assess two opposing theses about the epistemology of religious belief. The first one, developed by John Mackie, claims that belief in God can be justified or warranted only if there is a good argument for the existence of God. The second thesis, elaborated by Alvin Plantinga, holds that even if there is no such argument, belief in God can be justified or warranted. I contend that the first thesis is plausibly false, because belief in God is not just like a scientific hypothesis, and the second thesis is likely true if epistemic externalism is the correct view. However, even if the second thesis is true, I argue that to work on good arguments for God’s existence is unavoidable in order to cope with a new version of the Great Pumpkin objection, as well as to achieve other relevant purposes such as to convince rational observers outside the theistic community that belief in God is likely justified or warranted.

Questo lavoro esamina il pensiero metaetico di John L. Mackie per l’importanza e l’ancora attualità che riveste in ambito etico il dibattito tra realismo e anti-realismo morale e l’indubbia importanza che la sua opera del 1977 "Ethics" ha rivestito in questo dibattito. Dovendo sintetizzare al massimo il dibattito tra realismo e anti-realismo morale potremmo dire che esso riguarda l’esistenza di valori o enti morali indipendentemente dal soggetto, di per sé esistenti (posizione realista), oppure il far ricadere la moralità in un qualcosa inerente la soggettività umana (posizione anti-realista). Per dirla con Mackie la questione riguarda l’esistenza o meno di valori morali oggettivi. Così si riporta al centro la questione ontologica nel dibattito morale, dopo un periodo in cui la riflessione metaetica si concentrò sulla semantica e sul linguaggio morale, credendo di poter ridurre i problemi filosofici a problemi di linguaggio, cosa per Mackie inaccettabile. Mackie sposta il piano dell’indagine da quello semantico a quello ontologico elaborando un pensiero metaetico molto originale diventato nel dibattito contemporaneo un punto di riferimento imprescindibile seppur, nella maggior parte dei casi, per essere fatto oggetto di polemica. Questo lavoro si concentra quindi  sulla prima parte dell’opera di Mackie, "Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong", nella quale l’autore si occupa di metaetica inaugurando il dibattito tra realismo e anti-realismo morale.

Religious diversity is a key topic in contemporary philosophy of religion. One way religious diversity has been of interest to philosophers is in the epistemological questions it gives rise to. In other words, religious diversity has been seen to pose a challenge for religious belief. In this study four approaches to dealing with this challenge are discussed. These approaches correspond to four well-known philosophers of religion, namely, Richard Swinburne, Alvin Plantinga, William Alston, and John Hick. The study is concluded by suggesting four factors which shape one’s response to the challenge religious diversity poses to religious belief.

Was Nietzsche a nihilist? Yes, because, like J. L. Mackie, he was an error-theorist about morality, including the elitist morality to which he himself subscribed. But he was variously a diagnostician, an opponent and a survivor of certain other kinds of nihilism. Schacht argues that Nietzsche cannot have been an error theorist, since meta-ethical nihilism is inconsistent with the moral commitment that Nietzsche displayed. Schacht’s exegetical argument parallels the substantive argument (advocated in recent years by Wright and Blackburn) that Mackie’s error theory can’t be true because if it were, we would have to give up morality or give up moralizing. I answer this argument with a little bit of help from Nietzsche. I then pose a problem, the Doppelganger Problem, for the meta-ethical nihilism that I attribute to Mackie and Nietzsche. (If A is a moral proposition then not-A is a moral proposition: hence not all moral propositions can be false.) I solve the problem by reformulating the error theory and also deal with a variant of the problem, the Reinforced Doppelganger, glancing at a famous paper of Ronald Dworkin’s. Thus, whatever its demerits, the error theory, is not self refuting, nor does it require us to give up morality.

When one deliberates one has reasons both for and against doing something.  Could the reasons for OBJECTIVELY outweigh the reasons against, in the sense that someone who thought otherwise would simply be wrong?  (This is not the same question as that of whether any of the competing reasons could be objectively valid in itself.)  Three seemingly relevant kinds of ethical theory are examined: virtue ethics, utilitarianism and moral absolutism.  It is suggested that the proponents of these have all so far failed to show that they can give compelling objective reasons for acting on certain reasons rather than others.  We so far lack any conception of what sort of second-order considerations could adjudicate between competing reasons.  This is not so much an ‘error theory’ in J. L. Mackie’s sense as an admission of ignorance.

Richard Swinburne, in his The Existence of God (2004), presents a cosmological argument in defence of theism (Swinburne, 1991, p119, p135). God, Swinburne argues, is more likely to bring about an ordered universe than other states (ibid., p144, p299). To defend this view, Swinburne presents the following arguments: (1) That this ordered universe is a priori improbable (2004, p49, p150, 1991, p304 et seq.), given the stringent requirements for life (cf. also Leslie, 2000, p12), and the Second Law of Thermodynamics (Giancoli, p396); (2) That it seems as if this ordered universe can be explained by theism; (3) A theistic explanation for the universe is more probable because it is a simple explanation. To this end, Swinburne makes use of Bayes’ Theorem. Symbolically, this claim can be represented as (e) for the evidence of the existence of a complex universe, and (h) for a hypothesis. Swinburne’s argument is that theism has a higher prior probability, P(h(theism)) > P(h(materialism)), since theism is simpler than materialism. He concludes that P(e|h(theism)) > P(e|h(materialism)). In this paper I will address only this argument (3) above, and defend the view that it is false: theism is not simpler than materialism, nor it is more probably true. I conclude that theism is less probable than materialism, expressed by P(h(theism)) < P(h(materialism)) : 2/N(2n+1) < 1/n, where N is the number of possible universes and n the number of entities in existence.

In an earlier paper, 'Peter Geach on nonsense, confusion and sin' 1 , I suggested that what one can say in explanation of one's own actions suffers from a severe limitation: one can shed little light on the question why one acted on one's reasons for an action rather than on one's reasons against that action. In this paper I want to explore this suggestion further. One of my tasks will be to distinguish my question from three standard philosophical questions that have tended to overshadow it: the question of freewill and determinism; that of the relation between fact and value; and that of the possibility of weakness of will. On these I shall, on the whole, maintain a studied agnosticism.

Given ht as the hypothesis of theism, hm as the hypothesis of materialism, and e as the evidence of a complex life-bearing universe, Swinburne presents these arguments in his "The Existence of God" (2004): (1) That this ordered universe is a priori improbable (2004, p49, p150, 1991, p304 et seq.), given the stringent requirements for life (cf. Leslie, 2000, p12), and the Second Law of Thermodynamics (Giancoli, p396); (2) That this universe’s structure is evidence for theism, and that theism therefore explains this universe. Swinburne argues that that because P(e| ht) > P(e| hm), it follows that P(ht |e) > P(hm |e). (3) A theistic explanation for the universe is more probable because it is simpler. Therefore it is more likely that God exists than not. As I have addressed (3) in a prior paper, this paper will address the Bayesian argument that Swinburne offers in (2) — i.e. that P(e| ht) > P(e). I draw a number of conclusions, most pertinently, that Hacking's Total Probability Rule (TPR), for cases of mutually exclusive hypotheses [ht v hm] and evidence e entails that any h can only be confirmed if P(e|~h) is low. I also conclude that if we follow TPR for Swinburne's argument, we achieve the result that theism is at best slightly improbable, or equiprobable with materialism.

The aim of this thesis is to articulate an actual consent account of legitimate government as appointed by a free association of people, to protect them from harm, with the power to use coercion both to apprehend wrongdoers and to collect taxes in order to finance its activities in the most efficient way possible. The account itself is articulated in section III. 2, and depends on a form of moral skepticism defended in section II. 1, and an argument for the legitimacy of certain forms of coercion articulated in section II. 3, claiming that those who non-consent to an authority whose only purpose is to provide protection from harm to all who consent to it have no moral standing to protest being coerced by the authority as it carries out its duty. This argument is able to justify only a minimal state, or the minimal core of a larger, altogether non-voluntaristic state, concerned with providing protection from harm, though it doesn’t exclude the possibility of justifying further government powers with additional arguments. Section III. 3 discusses some lines of argument for supplementing the voluntaristic state with a regime of private property.

Mackie’s claim that in general courage benefits its possessor seems inconsistent with his ‘error theory’ of value.  But how plausible is it in itself?  I suggest that his arguments for the claim fail in the same way as the arguments of those who more explicitly embrace ‘virtue ethics’ fail.  We do not know any way of objectively weighing risks against other considerations, of deciding whether something is ‘worth the risk’.  Since I have no PROOF that there could not be a way, I prefer to speak of ‘ignorance’ rather than ‘error’ here.

I argue that Mackie's thesis about courage and self-interest is neither consistent with his 'error theory' of value nor convincing in itself.  The question of the objectivity of value needs to be distinguished from that of whether one value can objectively outweigh or outrank another.  This is so even when the only values under consideration are self-interested ones.

علیت یکی از مسائل مهم فلسفی است که تحلیل‌های هیوم آن را با چالش‌ها و معضلات زیادی روبرو ساخته و تئورسین‌های بسیاری را به نظریه‌پردازی در این خصوص واداشته است. از جملۀ این نظریه‌پردازان می‌توان به تلاش‌های دو فیلسوف تحلیلی یعنی؛ لوئیس و جی. ال. مکی در این خصوص اشاره کرد که هر دوی آن‌ها اساس و بنیاد نظریۀ خود را بر پایۀ نقد و اصلاح نظریۀ هیوم بنا نموده‌اند.
نویسنده در این مقاله با یک بررسی تطبیقی، به تبیین منطقی رویکردهای مزبور می‌پردازد و "ابهام در مدلول علت" را به عنوان یکی از مهم‌ترین عوامل نارسایی و نقصان در رویکردهای مزبور معرفی می‌کند. از نگاه او، اگر چه به گفتۀ لوئیس رویکرد هیوم تنها متضمن علت‌های کافی است و به همین سبب جامع نیست، رویکرد خود لوئیس نیز تنها متضمن علت‌های لازم است و بنابراین در مظان همین اتهام قرار خواهد داشت. سرانجام نویسنده با تبیین دیدگاه پیچیدۀ جی.ال. مکی، آن را به عنوان دیدگاه مطلوب‌تر می‌پذیرد و بر این نکته نیز تأکید می‌نماید که توسل تبیین‌گرایان یک رویداد خاص به شرطی‌های خلاف واقع در وصول به شرط‌های لازم آن، در اغلب موارد اجتناب‌ناپذیر است، لیکن در چنین مواردی ضروری است که مدلول علت کاملاً مشخص گردد.
Causation is one of the most important philosophical issues criticized by Hume's analysis and caused many philosophers to find solution and explanation. Lewis and J. L. Mackie, as analytic philosopher built the foundation of their theory upon the critique and modification of Hume's theory. The aim in this paper is to deal with, the issue and the authors attempt to present a comparative study by logical explanation on these approaches and introduce the "ambiguity in causation" as one of the most important factors of failure in these approaches. Although, according to Louis, as the authors hold, Hume's approach only implies sufficient causes and so is not comprehensive, Lewis's own approach only involves the necessary reasons, and therefore it envisages a charge of the same challenge. Finally, the authors explained the complex view of J. L. Mackie and accepts it as a more favorable view and also emphasizes that It is inevitable for scholars used of counterfactual conditions to obtain the necessary conditions., But in such cases it is necessary to define the type of causes.

In “The possibility of morality,” Phil Brown considers whether moral error theory is best understood as a necessary or contingent thesis. Among other things, Brown contends that the argument from relativity, offered by John Mackie—error theory’s progenitor—supports a stronger modal reading of error theory. His argument is as follows: Mackie’s is an abductive argument that error theory is the best explanation for divergence in moral practices. Since error theory will likewise be the best explanation for similar divergences in possible worlds similar to our own, we may conclude that error theory is true at all such worlds, just as it is in the actual world. I contend that Brown’s argument must fail, as abductive arguments cannot support the modal conclusions he suggests. I then consider why this is the case, concluding that Brown has stumbled upon new and interesting evidence that agglomerating one’s beliefs can be epistemically problematic—an issue associated most famously with Henry Kyburg’s lottery paradox.