# Quote — J. L. Mackie, Ethics

> If we see the good for man as happiness, conceived as a single, undifferentiated commodity, we may also suppose that it could be provided for all, in some centrally planned way, if only we could get an authority that was sufficiently powerful and sufficiently intelligent, and also one that we could trust to be uniformly well-disposed to all its subjects; and then the natural corollary would be that all property should be owned by all in common, collectively, and applied to the maximizing of the general happiness under the direction of this benevolent authority. But if we reject this unitary notion of happiness, and identify the good for man rather with the partly competitive pursuit of diverse ideals and private goals, then separate ownership of property will be an appropriate instrument for this pursuit.

- Author: [J. L. Mackie](https://www.leafyquotes.com/j-l-mackie.md)
- Book: [Ethics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/j-l-mackie/ethics.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/J._L._Mackie#Ethics:_Inventing_Right_and_Wrong_(1977)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/j-l-mackie/ethics/if-we-see

## More from this book

> Different people have irresolvably different views of the good life — not only at different periods of history and in different forms of society, but even in our own culture at the present time.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/j-l-mackie/ethics/different-people-have.md)

> No doubt one can stretch the notion of egocentric commendation...by saying that appropriate conditional, perhaps counterfactually conditional, clauses are to be assumed. The carving knife is one such as I would favour if I wanted to slice meat; the sunset is one such as I would favour if I were one for the beauties of nature; the weather is such as I would favour if I were a potato-grower — or, more dubiously, if I were a potato. But this is stretching the account, and it is gratuitous. What is common to all these cases is that in each there is, somewhere in the picture, some set of requirements or wants or interests, and the thing that is called good is being said to be such as to satisfy those requirements or wants or interests.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/j-l-mackie/ethics/no-doubt-one.md)

> It is in imaginative literature — including those parts of it which pass for history and biography — that what may be good in human life is concretely represented.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/j-l-mackie/ethics/it-is-in-imaginative.md)