J. L. Mackie

J. L. Mackie: The Philosopher Who Said Morality Is a Fiction

"There are no objective values." That sentence opens John Leslie Mackie's 1977 book "Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong," and it is one of the boldest opening lines in twentieth-century philosophy — a declaration that everything humans mean when they call an act wrong is, strictly speaking, false. Mackie did not stop at ethics: he applied the same corrosive rigor to the existence of God, arguing that suffering and an all-powerful, all-good deity are logically incompatible, and to causation itself, reducing the concept that holds science together to a precise formula of conditions. Few philosophers have been willing to tell their own species, so plainly, that two of its oldest convictions rest on error.

From Sydney to Oxford, by Way of War

Mackie was born in 1917 in Killara, a suburb of Sydney, Australia, to Alexander Mackie, a professor of education at the University of Sydney, and Annie Burnett Duncan, a schoolteacher. He was dux of Knox Grammar School and completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Sydney in 1938 under the philosopher John Anderson, a formative influence whose skeptical, argument-first style shaped Mackie's entire approach. A Wentworth Travelling Fellowship took him to Oriel College, Oxford, to study classics, where he earned first-class honours in 1940. The Second World War interrupted his academic path: he served with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers in the Middle East and Italy and was mentioned in dispatches for his service.

A Career Across Three Continents' Worth of Universities

After the war Mackie built an unusually itinerant academic career for a philosopher of his era. He held a professorship at the University of Otago in New Zealand from 1955 to 1959, then returned to Sydney to succeed his old teacher John Anderson as the Challis Professor of Philosophy from 1959 to 1963. From there he became the founding chair of philosophy at the new University of York in England in 1963, helping build a department essentially from nothing. In 1967 he moved to Oxford as a fellow of University College, where he served as praelector in philosophy until his death in Oxford on December 12, 1981. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1974, the senior recognition of scholarly achievement in the humanities in Britain.

Inventing Right and Wrong

Mackie's central and most influential claim is what philosophers now call moral error theory: the position that ordinary moral language purports to describe objective facts about right and wrong, but that no such facts exist, so that moral statements, taken at face value, are systematically false rather than merely subjective or relative. This was not moral relativism, which he considered too timid — Mackie insisted that people genuinely believe, and mean, that torturing for fun is objectively wrong, not just wrong relative to a preference, and that this widespread belief itself needs explaining as an error, not accommodating as a truth. His best-known argument for this position, the "argument from queerness," holds that if objective moral values did exist, they would be metaphysically strange entities unlike anything else in the natural world — facts that are somehow inherently motivating, knowable by some special faculty unlike ordinary perception, and utterly unlike the physical properties science otherwise catalogs. Since nothing else in our picture of reality looks remotely like this, Mackie concluded, the simplest explanation is that such values are not there at all, and that human moral psychology has projected them onto the world — an error, but a stubbornly durable one, built into ordinary moral talk since early socialization.

The Case Against God

Where his ethics book denied the existence of objective values, his 1955 paper "Evil and Omnipotence" and his posthumous 1982 book "The Miracle of Theism" turned the same forensic method on theism. Mackie revived and sharpened the logical problem of evil, arguing that the coexistence of genuine evil with a deity that is simultaneously omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good is not merely improbable but "positively irrational" — a strict logical contradiction rather than a matter of faith versus doubt. He attacked the free-will defense directly, contending that a truly omnipotent being could have created free creatures who nonetheless always freely chose the good, making the tradeoff between free will and evil unnecessary rather than inevitable. The philosopher Kai Nielsen called "The Miracle of Theism" one of the most distinguished articulations of an atheistic point of view in the literature, and Mackie's critique became influential enough that it drew a direct, still-debated rebuttal from the American philosopher Alvin Plantinga, whose free-will defense was constructed largely in response to Mackie's challenge.

The Cement of the Universe

Mackie's third major contribution, less publicly dramatic but methodologically foundational, was his 1980 book "The Cement of the Universe: A Study of Causation," which offered a counterfactual analysis of what it means for one event to cause another. He introduced the widely cited concept of an INUS condition — an Insufficient but Non-redundant part of a condition which is itself Unnecessary but Sufficient for an effect — a precise logical tool for capturing how, in ordinary and scientific reasoning alike, we pick out "the cause" of an event from among a tangle of contributing factors. The formulation remains a standard reference point in philosophy of causation and law.

Personal Life

Mackie married Joan Meredith in 1947. They had three children, all of whom pursued academic careers: Penelope Mackie, a philosopher who taught at Birmingham and Nottingham until 2022; David Mackie, a philosopher at Oxford's Oriel College; and Hilary Mackie, a classicist at Rice University. Colleagues remembered him as someone who could disagree forcefully in print while remaining generous and diplomatic toward opponents in person, reading their arguments in the strongest possible form before dismantling them.

Why J. L. Mackie Is Called a Genius

The case for Mackie's genius rests on a specific intellectual trait: the willingness to follow an argument to a conclusion almost nobody wants, and to state that conclusion in the plainest possible English. "There are no objective values" is not a hedge or a technical formulation buried in jargon — it is a direct assault on the intuitions of virtually every reader, delivered in the first sentence of the book, and defended with enough rigor that it reshaped an entire subfield of ethics still called, after him, error theory. The same pattern holds in his attack on theism and in his technical work on causation: in each case he isolated the strongest version of an opposing position and showed precisely where, by his lights, it broke. That is a narrow but real kind of genius — argumentative clarity and nerve rather than system-building or literary brilliance — and it is the quality his professional peers actually credit him with, from Kai Nielsen's praise of his atheism book to Alvin Plantinga's decision to build a career-defining response around Mackie's challenge rather than dismiss it. The honest limitation is that Mackie was not an originator of new philosophical vocabulary or a builder of grand systems in the way some of his contemporaries were; his achievement was analytical demolition and reconstruction of existing debates, not invention of new philosophical territory, and error theory itself remains a minority position that most working ethicists still reject.

Legacy

Mackie died in Oxford in 1981, having published six books that continue to anchor major debates in metaethics, philosophy of religion, and causation. Moral error theory, the argument from queerness, and the INUS-condition analysis of causation are all still taught, debated, and cited under his name — evidence of a philosopher whose gift was not consolation but clarity, however uncomfortable the conclusions.