Mackie’s argument from queerness

In his book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, J. L. Mackie famously put forward his “argument from queerness” against the objectivity of moral values.  The argument has both a metaphysical aspect and an epistemological aspect.  Mackie writes:

If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.  Correspondingly, if we were aware of them, it would have to be by some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else. (p. 38)

Mackie’s claim is that we simply have no good reason to believe either in such odd entities as objective values or in an odd special faculty of moral knowledge.  We can explain everything that needs to be explained vis-à-vis morality by analyzing values in terms of our subjective responses to certain events in the world, and Ockham’s razor favors this approach to the alternative given the latter’s “queerness.”

Naturally I think Mackie is wrong, though I don’t like the word “value” in this context.  “Value” suggests that which is valuable to or valued by someone, so that talk of “objective values” does indeed sound odd.  If X has “value” to the extent that someone values it, then even if we say that someone rationally should value X, its status as having value does seem to depend on us.  And in that case it is certainly at least understandable why the idea of something that has value but in a way that in no sense depends on our valuing it does sound “queer.”

The right thing to say is that goodness and badness are objective features of the world.  To use some of my stock examples, a tree with thick and deep roots is a good tree and a tree with weak and sickly roots is a bad one; a squirrel with four legs that scampers about and gathers nuts is to that extent a good squirrel while a squirrel that is missing a leg or lacks any desire to gather nuts is a bad one; a Euclidean triangle drawn slowly and carefully with a ruler is a good one while a Euclidean triangle drawn sloppily is a bad one; and so forth.  The core idea is that of a good or bad specimen of a kind of thing, of something which more or less adequately instantiates what is of the essence or nature of the kind.  By itself this does not entail moral goodness or badness, but moral goodness or badness do enter the picture when we bring in the rationality and free will that are distinctive of rational animals.  (For the full story see chapter 5 of Aquinas.)

To make sense of this metaphysically, however, we need something like Aristotelian formal and final causes, which, of course, most modern philosophers won’t countenance.  And that, I think, is crucial to understanding why Mackie’s argument seems to many contemporary readers to have force.  What is not explicitly said in the course of the argument itself is as important as what is said.  And what is not said is that the “objective,” natural world is to be understood in essentially the anti-teleological, anti-Aristotelian “mechanistic” way introduced by Galileo, Descartes, and their successors.  (See The Last Superstition for the full story about this intellectual revolution.  Of course I’ve also discussed it a great many times here on the blog.) 

Suppose you take the view that what is paradigmatically real is what can be captured via the methods of physics, where those methods involve giving a purely quantitative, mathematical description of those aspects of the material world susceptible of strict prediction and control.  Color, sound, odor, taste, heat, cold and qualitative features in general, as common sense understands them, are on this view not really features of objective reality as it is in itself, but only of our perception of objective reality.  What exists “out there” are only color, sound, etc. as redefined in terms of surface reflectance properties, compression waves, and so forth.  Neither, on this view, is teleology or goal-directedness (Aristotelian final cause) a real feature of the world.  We have ends and purposes (or seem to, anyway) but nothing in the world as described by physics does.  Neither are the hard and fast distinctions between kinds of thing that we see in the world (differences that reflect a difference in what Aristotelians call substantial forms) really there.  Water, stone, trees, worms, dogs, cats, and people are ultimately all “nothing but” the same kind of stuff, organized in relatively superficially different ways.  Suppose, in short, that the correct description of the natural world is given by a modern variation on the ancient atomist idea that everything we perceive as differing in kind and rich in qualities and meanings are “really” all just misleading appearances of the same desiccated substrate -- colorless, odorless, soundless, tasteless, meaningless particles in motion, and moving to no end or purpose but according to blind, mechanical necessity. 

As I’ve noted in my series of posts on Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, contemporary naturalists are often willing to concede that physics doesn’t give us the entire truth about the natural world, though I’ve also suggested there that implicit in such a concession is an acknowledgment that an Aristotelian, or dualist, or idealist, or in some other way non-naturalist conception of the material is correct after all, whether or not naturalists realize this.  Be that as it may, most naturalists (Nagel himself being one exception) are certainly keen to avoid Aristotelian final causes and related notions, whatever other concessions to the anti-reductionist they are prepared to make.

Seen in light of a broadly naturalistic metaphysics, though, value, including goodness and badness in particular, are indeed bound to seem very “queer.”  Even the difference between a good and bad specimen of a tree or a squirrel is going to seem odd if understood as an objective feature of the world.  For the goodness or badness here is irreducibly teleological and essentialist.  Sickly roots make of a tree a bad specimen, and the absence of a leg makes of a squirrel a bad specimen, only because of the ends toward which these irreducibly different kinds of thing point.  If they are both ultimately “really” just the same kind of stuff, and a kind of stuff in which there is no teleology to be found -- if, say, they are both “really” just particles in motion to no purpose -- then distinct “tree-like” and “squirrel-like” goods are not really objective features of nature.   They are at best useful fictions.  Goodness and badness, like color, sound, odor, etc. and like teleology and meaning, seem much more plausibly regarded as something the mind projects onto the external, natural world rather than something it really sees in that world as it is in itself.

Effectively to rebut Mackie’s position, then, in my view requires rebutting first the naturalism or scientism that it implicitly presupposes.  In particular, it requires, I would argue, a return to an essentially Aristotelian philosophy of nature.  Anything short of this is bound to leave “value” -- or rather, goodness and badness -- seeming so radically unlike and disconnected from anything else we know about objective reality that Mackie’s argument will retain its bite.

Here is one key area where we see the ineffectiveness of the “new natural law theory” of Grisez and Finnis, which famously eschews the traditional natural law theorist’s commitment to Aristotelian formal and final causes, concedes the Humean “fact/value dichotomy,” and attempts to ground natural law theory in an account of practical reason considered from the subjective point of view of the agent, rather than in the metaphysics of human nature considered objectively.   If this doesn’t quite give the game away to Mackie, it comes close.

Hence, consider “new natural lawyer” Robert P. George’s response to Mackie in chapter 1 of his book In Defense of Natural Law.  As I read him, George presents two basic lines of argument against the “argument from queerness.”  The first is to note that there are other aspects of reality that seem equally “queer” and difficult to fit into the natural world -- George cites consciousness, meaning, causation, and the normative status, in logic, of truth and validity -- yet Mackie and like-minded thinkers are committed to the reality of at least some of these features, at least implicitly. 

Now I certainly agree with George that these features are no less “queer” given a naturalistic view of things than goodness and badness are.  But it is no good merely to point this out as if it sufficed to rebut Mackie.  For Mackie himself considers this sort of objection in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, and thinks he has an answer to it (an answer George does not address).  His answer is to suggest that for any phenomena which seem as “queer” as objective values do, either they can at the end of the day be analyzed in what Mackie would regard as metaphysically respectable terms, or if not “then they too should be included, along with objective values, among the targets of the argument from queerness” (p. 39).

As readers of Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality know, there is virtually no limit to what some contemporary philosophers might be willing to chuck out as too “queer” to be reconciled with naturalism.  I have argued at length in a series of posts on Rosenberg’s book that the resulting position is incoherent, but it is not enough to point out the problems with reductionist and eliminativist accounts of consciousness, intentionality, and the like.  It is not even enough to opt for a Cartesian sort of dualism on which conscious experiences, intentionality, value, and the like are tacked on to otherwise naturalistically-explicable human beings.  (Indeed, “new natural lawyers” themselves are always going on about how problematic Cartesian forms of dualism are.)  As long as you allow even just for the sake of argument that the entire natural world apart from a small sliver of natural history on a single planet can be entirely accounted for in terms of the mechanistic account of nature described above, it is going to seem “queer” to suppose that some radically different sorts of properties -- objective values -- together with a novel cognitive faculty for grasping them, suddenly came into existence only very recently in geological time, in a single species.  Treating objective value as a kind of cognitive illusion is going to seem more plausible given that general background metaphysics. 

George’s second response to Mackie suffers from the same drawback.  He suggests an “argument to the best explanation” according to which the existence of objective moral value better makes sense of our actual moral experience.  This is true, but by itself has little force if a broadly naturalistic metaphysics is taken for granted.  For the naturalist can always say that our moral experience provides merely a tiny sliver of all the data that needs to be accounted for.  And if the entirety of the rest of the natural order can be accounted for in something like the mechanistic terms outlined above, and the existence of objective values and operation of a special faculty of knowing them seem utterly mysterious on this picture, then the overall evidential situation (so the naturalist could argue) speaks against their existence.  As Mackie writes:

How much simpler and more comprehensible the situation would be if we could replace the moral quality with some sort of subjective response which could be causally related to the detection of the natural features on which the supposed quality is said to be consequential. (p. 41)

Properly to fit mind, meaning, and value into the natural order requires rethinking the natural order in general, not just where human nature is concerned.  In particular, it requires a return to just the sort of neo-Aristotelian project in the philosophy of nature that the Neo-Scholastics, whom Grisez and Finnis threw under the bus, were engaged in.  Nagel, with his neo-Aristotelian gestures in metaphysics, implicitly recognizes this.  And a general rethinking of the natural order is independently called for anyway, given that (as Aristotelians argue) Aristotelian concepts are required if we are properly going to understand change, causation, and the like in the non-human world.  In any event, short of such a rethink, those who affirm objective value will always be open to Mackie’s Josie Cotton-style taunt.