| Full name | John Leslie Mackie |
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| Born | 25 August 1917 Sydney |
| Died | 12 December 1981 (aged 64) Oxford |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School | Australian Realism, moral nihilism, analytic philosophy |
| Main interests | Ethics, metaphysics |
| Notable ideas | Argument from queerness |
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John Leslie Mackie (25 August 1917 – 12 December 1981) was an Australian philosopher, originally from Sydney. He made significant contributions to the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language, and is perhaps best known for his views on meta-ethics, especially his defence of moral skepticism.
He authored six books. His most widely known, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), opens by boldly stating that "There are no objective values". It goes on to argue that because of this ethics must be invented, rather than discovered.
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John Leslie Mackie was born 25 August 1917 in Sydney. His mother, Annie Burnett Duncan, was a schoolteacher,[1] and his father, Alexander Mackie, was professor of education at the University of Sydney as well as the principal of the Sydney Teachers College, and was influential in the educational system of New South Wales.[2] He graduated from the University of Sydney in 1938 after studying under John Anderson, sharing the medal in philosophy with eminent jurist Harold Glass. Mackie received the Wentworth Travelling Fellowship to study Greats at Oriel College, Oxford, where he graduated with a first in 1940.
During World War II he served with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers in the Middle East and Italy. He was professor of philosophy at the University of Otago in New Zealand from 1955 to 1959 and at the University of Sydney from 1959 to 1963. In 1963 he moved to the United Kingdom, becoming the inaugural holder of the chair of philosophy in the University of York, a position he held until 1967 when he was instead elected a fellow of University College, Oxford, where he served as praelector. In 1974 he became a fellow of the British Academy.
On 12 December 1981 he died of cancer in Oxford.[2]
Mackie is said to have been capable of expressing total disagreement in such a genial way that the person being addressed might mistake the comment for a compliment.[3] This personal style is exemplified by the following words from the preface to Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977, p. 3):
| “ | ...I am nowhere mainly concerned to refute any individual writer. I believe that all those to whom I have referred, even those with whom I disagree most strongly, have contributed significantly to our understanding of ethics: where I have quoted their actual words, it is because they have presented views or arguments more clearly or more forcefully than I could put them myself. | ” |
One of Mackie's daughters, Penelope Mackie, also became a philosopher. She lectured in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham from 1994 to 2004, and was Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham in 2007.
Mackie was most well known for his contributions to the fields of meta-ethics, philosophy of religion, and metaphysics. In meta-ethics, he took a position that he called moral skepticism (though, arguably, it would be better termed "moral nihilism"), arguing against the objective existence of right and wrong as intrinsically normative entities on fundamental grounds unsure what kinds of things such entities would be, if they existed.
His perhaps most widely known work,[1] Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, bluntly begins with the opening sentence "There are no objective values". He uses several arguments to support this claim that objective values are false. He argues that some aspects of moral thought are relative, and that objective morals require an absurd intrinsic action-guiding feature. Most of all, he thinks it is very unclear how objective values could supervene on features of the natural world (see the Argument from Queerness). Fourth, he thinks it would be difficult to justify our knowledge of "value entities" or account for any links or consequences they would have. And, finally, he thinks it is possible to show that even without any objective values, people would still have reason to firmly believe in them (hence, he claims that it is possible for people to be mistaken or fooled into believing that objective values exist). The Times called the book "a lucid discussion of moral theory which, although aimed at the general reader, has attracted a good deal of professional attention."[2]
Concerning religion, he was well known for vigorously defending atheism, and also arguing that the problem of evil made untenable the main monotheistic religions (see, for example, Mackie 1982). His criticisms of the free will defence are particularly significant. He argued that the idea of human free will is no defense for those who wish to believe in an omnicompetent being in the face of evil and suffering, as such a being could have given us both free will and moral perfection, thus resulting in us choosing the good in every situation. Thus, Mackie's critique of free will theodicies was based on his support for compatibilism. In 1955 he published one of his most reprinted articles,[4] "Evil and Omnipotence", summarizing his view that the simultaneous existence of evil and an all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good God was "positively irrational".[5] Mackie's views on this so-called logical problem of evil prompted Alvin Plantinga to respond with his version of the Free Will Defense.
In metaphysics, Mackie made significant contributions relating to the nature of causal relationships, especially regarding conditional statements describing them (see, for example, Mackie 1974) and the notion of an INUS condition.
Upon being given a copy of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene as a Christmas present,[1] he in 1978 wrote an article in the journal Philosophy praising the book and discussing how its ideas might be applied to moral philosophy.[6] Philosopher Mary Midgley responded in 1979 with "Gene-Juggling," an article arguing that The Selfish Gene was about psychological egoism, rather than evolution.[7] This started a dispute between Mackie, Midgley and Dawkins that was still ongoing at the time of Mackie's death.
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