Mackie’s Theory Of Error: Does Objective Morality Exist?
The human being is a gregarious and social being, who requires contact with other members of his species to survive and adapt successfully. But living together is not easy: it is necessary to establish a series of rules that allow us to limit our behavior so that both our own rights and those of others are respected, rules that are generally based on ethics and morality: what what is right and what is wrong, what is right and wrong, what is just and unjust, what is worthy or what is unworthy, and what is considered permissible and what is not.
Since ancient times, morality has been the subject of philosophical discussion and over time of scientific research from fields such as psychology or sociology, with multiple positions, perspectives and theories on the matter. One of them is Mackie’s error theory which we are going to talk about throughout this article.
Mackie’s so-called error theory is an approach made by the author himself according to which each and every one of our moral judgments are erroneous and false, based on the consideration that morality does not exist as an objective element, moral properties do not exist in reality as such but morality is constructed based on subjective beliefs. Technically, this theory would fall within a cognitivist perspective of what is called subjectivist antirealism.
The theory of error was developed by John Leslie Mackie in 1977, based on the premises of cognitivism and indicating that if true moral judgments existed, they would be principles that guide the behavior directly and which would not be possible to doubt.
Considers that moral judgment is a cognitive act that has the capacity for falsification, but given that moral judgment only exists insofar as there really is an always moral property as such, invariable and without possibility of interpretation
However, and given that this property does not exist at an absolute level but rather what is or is not moral is decided by the community of belonging, no moral judgment can be true either. Therefore, although it may be socially considered true for a given group that completely shares such judgments, moral judgment always makes the mistake of believing itself to be objective.
The author’s intention is not to eliminate or consider the moral act useless (that is, he does not want to stop doing things considered just or good), but to reform the way of understanding ethics and morality as something relative and not as a universal absolute. It’s more, proposes that ethics and morality must continually reinvent themselves not being something fixed to study but rather it must be modified depending on how humanity evolves.
Two basic arguments
In developing his theory John Mackie considers and uses two different types of arguments. The first of them is the argument of the relativity of moral judgments arguing that what we consider moral may not be so for another person without them being wrong.
The second argument is that of singularity. According to this argument, if there are objective properties or values They should be entities different from anything that exists, in addition to requiring a special faculty to be able to capture said property or value. And one more property would still be necessary, that of being able to interpret the observed facts with the objective value.
Instead, Mackie considers that what we really experience is a reaction to the vision of an event that is derived from what we have learned culturally or from the connection with our own experiences. For example, one animal hunting another for food is a behavior that is visible to us, and that will generate different subjective impressions for each of those affected.
Morality as subjective perception: a comparison with color
Mackie’s error theory establishes, therefore, that every moral judgment is false or erroneous since it is based on the assumption that the moral property that we grant to an act or phenomenon is universal.
As an analogy to make his theory more easily understandable, the author himself used the example of color perception in his theory. We may see a red, blue, green, or white object, as well as a vast majority of people doing so as well.
However, the object in question does not have that or those colors per se since in reality when we see colors what we see is the refraction in our eyes of the wavelengths of light that the object has not been able to absorb.
Color would therefore not be a property of the object but rather our biological reaction to the reflection of light: it will not be something objective but subjective. Thus, the water of the sea is not blue or the leaf of the tree is green, but we perceive them as that color. And in fact, not everyone will see the same color as can occur in the case of a color blind person.
The same can be said of moral properties: there would be nothing good or bad, moral or amoral by itself, but we perceive it as such based on its fit with our perception of the world. And just as a color blind person might not perceive the color red (even if he identifies a certain shade as such), another person will judge that an act that for us has a specific moral connotation has for him the directly opposite.
Although the fact that morality is something subjective today may seem logical to us to assume, the truth is that morality has been considered something objective and invariable by a large number of people throughout history, often also being a reason for discrimination against groups (for example, people of a different race, religion or sexuality than the typical one) or practices that we consider common today.
