Argument from queerness
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"The Argument from Queerness" is a term used by J. L. Mackie in his book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong to describe a certain sort of reductio ad absurdum that he uses against moral objectivism; he argues that "if there were objective values, then they would be entities of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe", and that this in itself is sufficient reason for doubting their existence. The same sort of argument could be applied to other supposed unperceivable entities, such as a God or gods, a soul or "self" or free will.
In his book Morality without Foundations: A Defense of Ethical Contextualism (Oxford University Press, 1999), Mark Timmons provides a reconstruction of Mackie's views in the form of two the related arguments. These are based on the rejection of properties, facts, and relationships that do not fit within the worldview of philosophical naturalism, the idea "that everything — including any particulars events, facts, properties, and so on — is part of the natural physical world that science investigates." (page 12) Timmons adds, "The undeniable attraction of this outlook in contemporary philosophy no doubt stems from the rise of modern science and the belief that science is our best avenue for discovering the nature of reality." (pp. 12-13).
The first argument is that our ordinary moral discourse purports to refer to intrinsically prescriptive properties and facts "that would somehow motivate us or provide us with reasons for action independent of our desires and aversions" — but such properties and facts do not comport with philosophical naturalism (page 50). The second is that, if moral realism posits the existence of objective moral properties that supervene upon natural properties (such as biological or psychological properties), then the relation between the moral properties and the natural properties is metaphysically mysterious and does not comport with philosophical naturalism (p. 51).
Also, Timmons says, in connection with both of these arguments Mackie makes the point that a moral realistic who countenances the existence of metaphysically queer properties, facts, and relations must also posit some special faculty by which we have knowledge of them (Timmons p. 51).
Christine Korsgaard responds to Mackie, "Of course there are entities that meet these criteria. It's true that they are queer sorts of entities and that knowing them isn't like anything else. But that doesn't mean that they don't exist.... For it is the most familiar fact of human life that the world contains entities that can tell us what to do and make us do it. They are people, and the other animals." (The Sources of Normativity, 1996)
Criticisms of the argument include noting that for the very fact that such entities would have to be something fundamentally different from what we normally experience - and therefore assumably outside our sphere of experience - we cannot prima facie have reason to either doubt or affirm their existence; therefore, if one had independent grounds for supposing such things to exist (such as, for instance, a reductio ad absurdum of the contrary) then the argument from queerness cannot give you any particular reason to think otherwise[citation needed].
