WJEC/Eduqas RS for A2/Yr2: Religion and Ethics (DRAFT)

WJEC / Eduqas Religious Studies for A Level Year 2 and A2 Religion and Ethics Specification content Challenges: no proof of moral intuition exists; intuitive ‘truths’ can differ widely; no obvious way to resolve conflicting intuitions.

No proof of moral intuition exists: the argument from queerness

Possibly the most famous of challenges to the proposal of Intuitionism was that of J. L. Mackie in his book, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong , published in 1977 (pages 38–42). Mackie’s position is that there are no objective ethical values, that is, values that can be known, verified and part of the empirical world and yet at the same time independent of us. Mackie argues that what Intuitionism does is present us with implausible oddities and strange suggestions that ultimately make the whole theory queer; hence, he refers to it as ‘ the argument from queerness ’. Mackie writes: ‘Even more important, however, and certainly more generally applicable, is the argument from queerness. This has two parts, one metaphysical and the other epistemological. 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 normal ways of knowing everything else.’ Firstly, it is this very ‘queerness’ of moral properties that makes it implausible that they exist. Mackie’s is a very heavily empirically based objection and no different from Kant’s challenge against the cosmological argument for the existence of God that if a God did exist, this ‘first cause’ would be so very different from anything that we experience or know and so would not be able to recognise or know about it. This is because our knowledge is limited to the phenomenal world of space and time and it is not possible to speculate about what may or may not exist independently of space and time. Secondly, Mackie refers to Hume when considering how knowledge can never provide an ‘influencing motive of the will’ and that any ethical term that does this has to add the element of queerness to a particular description. In the end, Mackie summarises the proposal that moral judgements are made and issues solved by an ethical intuition ‘is a travesty of actual moral thinking’. Intuitive ‘truths’ can differ widely and there is no way to resolve conflicting intuitions The main problem with Intuitionism for many philosophers is that because there is no real, established list of ‘duties’ or ‘obligations’ then not only are people unaware of what they should do, what they think they should do will also differ widely. Ross and Prichard did make reference to some suggested ‘duties’, Prichard in his various essays through illustration and Ross through a more systematic presentation of what he called ‘prima facie’ duties. However, the fact that duties vary from person to person and situation to situation, the wide difference is potentially unavoidable. Stratton-Lake concurs, ‘if intuitions are intellectual seemings, one might ask why certain moral propositions seem true whereas others do not’. For example, if two people met the same moral dilemma and yet had different intuitions about what was the right thing to do then how would this be resolved? Rather than solving moral problems it appears to make them more complex to actually work out. More pertinently, even the Intuitionist philosophers cannot agree on what duties and obligations are universal. This may be due to the fact that they have slightly different approaches as we have seen – Moore is more consequentialist and yet Prichard and Ross are more deontological – yet the fact still remains that they disagree. As Richard Norman observes, ‘Clearly Ross’s experience may be different from Moore’s, for what is self-evidently true for one of them is self-evidently false for the other.’

Key term The argument from queerness: Mackie’s view that Intuitionism is to odd to accept

DRAFT

Knowledge that cannot be verified by empirical means has the same queerness as metaphysical entities according to J. L. Mackie.

1.22 Why did Mackie consider Prichard’s intuitivism ‘queer’?

Key quotes John Mackie maintained that moral properties, understood

broadly along intuitionist lines, are queer because they are inherently motivational, in the sense that when we come to see that some act is good, we are motivated to do it. No other property we know of has such inherent motivational force. (Stanford / Stratton-Lake) Of course the suggestions that moral judgements are made or moral problems solved by just sitting down and having an ethical intuition is a travesty of actual moral thinking. (Mackie)

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