Mackie And Harman's Argument Analysis

Morality a part of ethics is a debatable topic. The study of ethics called metaethics deals with what morality is and deals with the scope of moral values. The debate in metaethics about morality is on the existence of moral facts. Philosophers have different perspective on morality and if it has a truth/false value like science does. Moral facts define morality as something that can have a truth value attached to it and thus there are principles governing what is moral and what is not. However, there are philosophers like J.L. Mackie and Gilbert Harman who do not believe in moral realism or that moral facts exist. Mackie believes in the second order moral subjectivism. He does not believe in the subjectivism that states that morality reports

one’s emotions or attitudes. He believes in moral skepticism which means that there do not exist entities or relations or objective values of a certain kind (Mackie in Perry, Bratman and Fischer, p. 778, 2016). Harman believes that we cannot observe moral facts because morality cannot be treated like science which we can observe and conclude to be true. He believes that moral values are more like mathematics where we take something to be true not by observation but because we know it is true (Harman in Perry, Bratman and Fischer, p.793, 2016.). On the other hand there are philosophers like James Rachels who are against subjectivism in philosophy. He believes that there are moral facts but their truth value weighs on reason rather than there being established principles to guide us to the true/false value of the moral fact (Rachels, p. x, 2012). Rachel therefore in a sense does not believe in the traditional definition of moral facts but does not believe in subjectivism Then there are philosophers like J.P. McBrayer who believe that there are moral facts simply because morality cannot be opinion based. The non-existence of moral facts is a compelling argument and we look to conclude that moral facts do not exist and they in fact don’t have a truth/false value.
J.

L. Mackie gives has a very compelling belief as to why moral facts don’t exist. He provides two arguments to prove his point: argument of relativity and queerness. Since moral facts don’t exist and we cannot think about moral facts in an objective sense. The argument from relativity states that there can be no objective moral facts because there are inconsistencies in moral beliefs around the world (Mackie p. 783-784, 2016). This is a compelling argument because there are different cultures that can have different moral beliefs that can even sometimes conflict with each other. We can consider a hypothetical society which does not believe in eating meat and considers it immoral. On the other hand we have societies that are fine with eating meat. Here we have a conflicting moral belief between two societies. So we possibly cannot tack on a truth value to eating meat is morally bad because some people believe it is bad while others don’t. This as Mackie states does not necessarily mean that social values dictate morality. We can have some universal facts like doing what is good or what brings about the greatest amount of good but they are only certain instances and the above examples of different societies disprove the existence of moral facts. So there are instances which can prove that moral facts don’t exist like how different societies can have conflicting instances of morality. So moral facts don’t

exist.
Another argument of Mackie that is compelling is the argument from queerness. This is a metaphysical argument that states that if we can’t know a moral fact empirically then how it can exist (Mackie p.784, 2016). We cannot sense moral facts nor do we know for example what goodness is or how we observe it to determine it to be a moral fact. There cannot be fixed principles that govern what we should do in a situation where we are supposed to act morally. Mackie gives the examples of Plato’s forms (p. 785, 2016) which include ideals of goodness. He states that since goodness is an ideal then there is not possibility of it existing objectively.
Another similar argument given by Harman deals with the fact that since we cannot observe moral facts like we can with scientific facts, they don’t exist. He gives an example of how sacrificing an innocent healthy medical patient to save the lives of a few patients appears morally wrong to us but goes against the moral facts that we are letting people die. Therefore we cannot just conclude something is moral simply from observation (Harman p. 789-790, 2016). We can have different scenarios where we think differently but are still being moral. We can consider the example of burning the gas with gasoline. Now we will consider that as an immoral act but the person who is burning the cat might be raised differently or might have their reasons for burning the cat and hence might conclude th act as moral while we don’t. Therefore we cannot just conclude that burning a cat is immoral just because we think it is. Therefore burning a cat is not koral cannot be a fact because different people have different perceptions of it and thus we cannot depend on observation. Thus moral facts cannot exist. We cannot conclude from our observation as to why someone thinks something is moral which refutes the existence of moral facts (Harman p. 792, 2016).
On the other hand philosophers like Rachels do not believe in subjectivism but still believe that moral facts do not exist or rather they exist but not in the traditional sense of them being fixed facts.

Rachels terms subjectivists as being people who think something is moral just because they believe that something is moral. He refutes that because it for one makes the universal facts like being good or spreading goodness around you as dependent on a person and makes disagreement impossible because different people have different views and make different observations which brings about the point Harman made about morality not being determined by observation. That does not necessarily mean that moral facts exist because this argument in no way refutes anything that Mackie or Harman said apart from the subjective view of Mackie. Rachels also believes that just thinking that morality is just an emotional response is wrong because if we take an example that A is a bad man. If I tell someone that A is a bad man to someone and they believe me but A is a actually a good person and I hate him for personal reasons then that means something cannot just be morally good if it has the desired psychological effect. Rachels believes that moral facts arise from moral reason i.e. they do have a truth/false value but that truth/false value comes from reason and not from established facts therefore we can conclude that moral facts don’t exist but there are moral values that have truth/false

values based on reason but that is not very compelling because there can be instances where people have a different sense of reasoning and therefore have conflicting moral values. We can take the example of ISIS in this case who think it is reasonable to commit mass genocide in the name of God but an atheist (or any normal person) does not. That does not mean that we cannot govern moral values on the basis of reason. In majority of the cases we can guide our moral values using reason but we cannot cement truth/false values to something and call it a fact. So morl facts don’t exist but reason is a general and compelling way to guide morality.
Now we can consider cases like that of McBrayer that moral facts exist as not very compelling. McBrayer considers morality to not be opinion based which is agreeable because of the reasons put forward by Rachels but we cannot just agree to the fact that moral facts exist simply because they are not opinion based (McBrayer p. 4, 2015). He believes that if there are no moral facts then there are no moral truths (McBrayer p.4, 2015) which is refutable because as Rachels said we can guide morality by reason and as stated above we can still avoid truth/false values and still guide most of our morality by reason while the remaining small portion of morality can be guided by the universal moral facts.
In conclusion moral facts do not exist. Moral fact is the term referring to assigning truth/false value to a moral value meaning that the particular moral value will always hold in every case. Mackie gives two arguments to prove why moral facts don’t exist. In one case we can’t obtain moral facts empirically and in the other we have conflicting moral values therefore concluding that there can be no fixed true/false value to morality. Harman claims that moral values cannot be judged like scientific facts can be based on observation since different people have different perceptions and therefore moral facts do not exist. Rachels claims moral facts exist but not in the sense that they are facts but more in the sense that they can differ between people but generally won’t because they are guided by reason and most people have similar reasoning to things. Philosophers like McBrayer believe the existence of moral facts but does not have a compelling enough argument to believe that moral facts do in fact exist. So thus we can conclude from all the evidence that moral facts i.e. moral values with true/false values attached to them exist.