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Mackay "wrong"

Posted on:2013-04-24Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:M W WeiFull Text:PDF
GTID:2245330395453015Subject:Foreign philosophy
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
John L.Mackie is famous on Metaethics studies."error-theory" is his representative work. The theory is about Moral discourse which include two questions:The first one is that can all the moral judgment be expressed in Truth-propositions; the second one is that do moral judgment indicate the moral entity?The view of error-theory is that all the moral judgments are factually meaningful but the moral qualities ascribed by them do not really exist, so all the Moral discourses are systematically and uniformly false. It is different from our common moral belief. Mackie want to say that there is no moral entity. He put forward two argument to sup-port the theory:The Argument from Relativity and The Argument from Queerness. The first argument means If there are objective values or moral facts by appeal to which moral disagreements can be resolved, those disagreements or some of those should dis-appear. But they still exist. Therefore, there are no moral facts. The second argument indicates that if there were objective values (wrongness, goodness), then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe. we need to have some special faculty of moral perception or intuition to see them. but we don’t have good reason to do that. Therefore, Mackie say moral is in-vented, not found. Mackie attempts to explain this theory of moral skepticism, which is different from the Moral Cognitivism and Moral Non-Cognitivism.The theory is also refuted by many way. The most powerfull refutation is C.Wright’s. Wright question Mackie’s view. he try to refute him from the Reductionism Argu-ment(we can call it Indirect argument). however, Miller think Wright’s argument is invalid. if he want to refute the theory, he must construct a Direct demonstration. it is very difficult to refute the "error-theory", but it doesn’t mean mackie is always right. Al-though we doesn’t have very full evidence to demonstrate the existence of Moral Reality, we still accept Moral Objectivilism. If we want to avoid moral skepticism and nihilism, and if moral debates make any sense, we must do this. if moral Objectivity have no con-tradiction with our moral life, we should allow its’ existence.
Keywords/Search Tags:Error-theory, Moral Entity, Moral Objectivity
PDF Full Text Request
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