Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-03T19:40:25.477Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Mackie's Moral ‘Scepticism’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Jonathan Harrison
Jonathan Harrison
Affiliation:
University of Nottingham
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Gallant hero of romantic film, who has just killed his equally gallant antagonist in a duel: ‘Was I wrong, father?’ Father (Yul Brynner): ‘You were both wrong; and you were both right, too.’

David Hume, speaking of moral sceptics, once said ‘And as reasoning is not the source, whence either disputant derives his tenets; it is in vain to expect, that any logic, which speaks not to the affections, will ever engage him to embrace sounder opinions‘. I am guilty of an inconsistency of some kind in quoting the above passage from Hume with approval for, though everything Hume wrote ought to be quoted with approval, it is inconsistent to approve of advice, and then immediately to disregard it. I am also guilty of an inconsistency of another kind. Once upon a time I myself defended a version of moral scepticism, but I can say in mitigation of this deplorable act that my tongue was partly in my cheek at the time, which is where one's tongue should be on the occasion of addressing the Joint Session of the Mind Association and the Aristotelian Society.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 57 , Issue 220 , January 1982 , pp. 173 - 191
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1980

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, L. A. Selby-Bigge (ed.), revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 170.

2 In ‘Moral Scepticism‘, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume XLI (1967). A more detailed discussion of some of the points I make in this article will be found in my Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1971).

3 In Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978).

4 In Philosophical Papers (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1959).

5 For example, by Alan White in Truth (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1971).

6 See my Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong.