J. L. Mackie

John Leslie Mackie (1917–1981) was an Australian philosopher whose work in metaethics, epistemology, and philosophy of religion included influential arguments against objective moral values and theism.

Metaethics: The branch of philosophy that examines the meaning, status, and foundations of moral judgments. Mackie’s best-known work asks whether moral judgments describe objective facts.
Moral error theory: The view that ordinary positive moral claims purport to state facts but are systematically false because objective moral facts do not exist. Mackie’s central metaethical position explains why moral discourse makes a mistaken claim to objectivity.
Evil and Omnipotence: A 1955 essay by Mackie arguing that the existence of evil conflicts with the existence of an omnipotent, wholly good God. This essay presents Mackie’s influential logical problem of evil.
Richard Joyce: An Australian philosopher known for defending and developing contemporary moral error theory. Joyce later extended the error-theoretic project associated with Mackie.
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong: Mackie’s 1977 book arguing that objective values do not exist and that ordinary moral judgments are systematically mistaken. The book gives his mature, sustained defense of moral error theory.
Moral realism: The view that moral claims can be true and that some are true independently of anyone’s attitudes. Mackie’s error theory rejects the objective moral facts moral realism posits.
Argument from queerness: An argument that objective moral values would be metaphysically and epistemologically unlike anything else in the world. Mackie uses this argument to challenge the existence of objective values.
Problem of evil: The challenge to belief in an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good God posed by the existence of evil. Mackie’s argument is a prominent formulation of this challenge.
Simon Blackburn: A British philosopher who developed quasi-realism as an alternative to both moral realism and error theory. Blackburn offers a noncognitivist response to the metaethical alternatives Mackie helped shape.
Quasi-realism: A project that explains realist-sounding moral discourse without treating moral properties as independent facts. It offers a rival account of how moral language can function after Mackie’s critique.

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Antony FlewRelated: Mackie and Flew both became prominent twentieth-century defenders of atheism.