Analysis Of J. Mackie's The Subjectivity Of Values

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J. Mackie in his essay, “The Subjectivity of Values”, geared his audience towards the idea that not all people’s moral values are necessarily the same. Not every person has the same value for certain circumstances, objects or other things which moral values can be applied to. Mackie explains moral values somewhat like this; that they are not necessarily based on behavior alone but that behavior can have some affect within certain values. Not all people that act similar necessarily will have the same values. I see Mackie trying to explain his view as many similar people have similar interests, but at the same time there is always those people who are similar by action but different by mentality and ethics. That is where Mackie drew the difference between the idea people were getting that he was solely basing his ideas off …show more content…

In the end I see Mackie saying that there are no morally good people, however that is only because there is no such thing as morally good or bad people. Mackie’s argument from queerness comes in two set points. The first point being the metaphysical argument, 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. ” And the second point is stated as an epistemological argument, is that there would be no way to know these queer things without a special, non-empirical means of knowing them (intuition). Through this argument it seems as though Mackie is telling us that objective moral facts should create urge in ourselves to do whatever it is we are urged to do, yet morality cannot make us do anything itself and therefore leads to Mackie to seem to conclude with the idea that there are indeed no such thing as moral

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