J. L. Mackie

Quotes

1. It is simply an error, though no doubt an attractive and inspiring one, to suppose that there is one evil — capitalism, say, or colonialism — the destruction of which would make everything in the garden lovely.

2. 

   Men...are almost always concerned more with their selfish ends than with helping one another. The function of morality is primarily to counteract this limitation of men's sympathies. We can decide what the content of morality must be by inquiring how this can best be done.

3. 

   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.

4. 

   The facts have to be determined by empirical evidence, and our thinking has then to conform to the facts, not the facts to our thinking

5. 

   'Our sense of justice,' whether it is just yours and mine, or that of some much larger group, has no authority over those who dissent from its recommendations or even over us if we are inclined to change our minds.

6. 

   The alternative to universalism is not an extreme individualism. Any possible, and certainly any desirable, life is social. We can see each individual as located in a number of circles — smaller and larger, but sometimes intersecting, not all concentric — and so united with others in a variety of ways. Within any circle, large or small, we must expect and accept not only some cooperation but also some competition and conflict, but different kinds and degrees of these in circles of different size.

7. 

   We want people to see it as not only legitimate but right and proper that they should pursue what they see as their own well-being.

8. 

   If we admire and enjoy the flourishing of human life, we shall naturally delight also in the flourishing of animal life.

9. 

   A morality in the broad sense would be a general, all-inclusive theory of conduct: the morality to which someone subscribed would be whatever body of principles he allowed ultimately to guide or determine his choices of action. In the narrow sense, a morality is a system of a particular sort of constraints on conduct — ones whose central task is to protect the interests of persons other than the agent and which present themselves to an agent as checks on his natural inclinations or spontaneous tendencies to act. In this narrow sense, moral considerations would be considerations from some limited range, and would not necessarily include everything that a man allowed to determine what he did. In the second sense, someone could say quite deliberately, 'I admit that morality requires that I should do such-and-such, but I don't intend to: for me other considerations here overrule the moral ones.'

10. 

    Hardly any part of anyone's conduct concerns only himself.

11. 

    Disagreement about moral codes seems to reflect people's adherence to and participation in different ways of life. The causal connections seems to be mainly that way round: it is that people approve of monogamy because they participate in a monogamous way of life rather than that they participate in a monogamous way of life because they approve of monogamy.

12. 

    Does the right of a nation as it is at present to its territory include the right to forbid or to limit immigration, or to deny full citizenship to immigrants and even to the locally born children of immigrants? Obviously this raises the question just what is to count over time as the same nation.