Last week ended in a strange place, and we should pick it up again before we go on. We took an ordinary wrong — a scratched car, or whatever example each of us reached for — and applied the second view's reading to it. We found no fact in the metal, no wrongness sitting in the world to be detected. And then, step by step, we rebuilt the whole ordinary view regardless: that it is true the act was wrong, that we could be mistaken about it, that it would be wrong however we had been raised — every claim the realist wanted, and not one fact underneath any of it. And I asked the question that follows from that. If we can say all of this and mean it, with no fact anywhere, is there anything the realist has that we do not? And I said a third person was coming. Someone who hears that rescue — the second view saving every moral word, the word "true" most of all — and shakes his head. Someone who looks at "no fact, but keep the truth" and says: no. If there is no fact, there is no truth to keep. You are not saving the words. You are refusing to admit what the missing fact means.
Tonight we meet him. And I have to tell you at the outset what he says, because it is the claim you have wanted to reject since the first episode. He says that every moral claim you have ever made — "torturing a child for fun is wrong," every one of them — is false. Not exaggerated. Not true for some and not for others. False: strictly, plainly false, in the same way that "the witch cursed the milk" is false. Not because the wrong is too small to count. Because the thing the sentence reaches for is not there.
The natural response is to dismiss him. Absurd; next. And I am going to ask you — not to agree with him, which I will not ask tonight or ever — to stay with him a little longer than the impulse to dismiss him allows. Because there is something uncomfortable about this man: the objection you most want to make cannot remove him. The move is "but it just is wrong; I am certain; only a monster says otherwise." He anticipated it. He predicted, before you spoke, that you would have exactly that certainty and would not be able to back it up. And you have met that shape of certainty before — a woman, sure past all doubt that a curse had soured her milk, her conviction total and directed at nothing real. The certainty you want to dismiss him with is her certainty.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required. This is the fifth of eight episodes. Last time we took up the second view — no fact out there, and almost nothing lost: every ordinary word earned back, "true" and "mistaken" and "wrong however you were raised," without a fact underneath it — though it carried a debt of its own, the word "wrong" inside an "if." Tonight, the third and last view — and the man who holds it agrees with the second on the one thing that matters and parts from it on everything after. The same missing fact. The opposite conclusion. Where the second view said no fact, keep the truth, this one says no fact, so the truth was never there — it is all a mistake, top to bottom, the mistake we make every time we speak. His name is Mackie. By the end of the hour he will not have moved your certainty by an inch — I promise you that, as I have promised it every week. But he will make it very hard to say what your certainty is certain of.
Let me introduce him properly, because he was not a crank and not a clever teenager. John Mackie was a serious philosopher, and his book, published in 1977, is called Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. The subtitle is the whole thesis in two words: inventing, not discovering. He held that morality was something human beings made, in the way they made money and marriage and the rules of the road — as real as any human institution, and not a set of truths waiting to be found; so that the claims we make in its language come out, strictly, false. He built that into an argument whose shape you should see clearly, because most people who recoil from it are recoiling from a caricature, and the real thing is harder.
The argument has two parts, and the point most people miss is that the two are separate. Keep them apart and the hour gets clearer.
The first part is a claim about what ordinary moral talk means. When we say "torturing a child for fun is wrong," Mackie says, we do not mean "I would rather he didn't." We do not mean "around here we disapprove." We mean that it is wrong — wrong as a feature of the act itself, wrong in a way that binds anyone, whatever they happen to want, whether they were raised to approve of it or not. The wrongness, as we mean it, is a kind of instruction built into the world: a this-is-not-to-be-done located in the act, binding on everyone, requiring no one's permission and no one's feelings. Mackie gives it a name: objective prescriptivity. A prescription — a do-this, don't-do-that — that is objective, out there, holding regardless of who is looking. And his claim is that this is not some optional, inflated version of morality. It is built into the ordinary meaning. It is what "wrong, full stop" says.
Now notice something, because it should give you pause. That first part — the claim about what our moral talk is committed to — is the very thing you have spent four episodes insisting on. It is your picture. When the first speaker said "it is just your feeling," you rejected him, because you meant more than your feeling. When the relativist said "it is just your culture's rule," you rejected him too, because you meant it would be wrong even if every culture approved. Every time someone tried to shrink "wrong" down to something small and local and human, you refused — you meant the real thing, the out-there thing, the thing that would hold in an empty universe. Mackie agrees with you entirely. He thinks you have read your own moral language correctly. On the first part, you and he stand in the same place.
Here is where he turns. The second part: there is no such thing. There is nothing in the world that is a prescription built into a fact, an instruction with no one to issue it, a to-be-done located in an act and binding on everyone regardless of their wants. The universe contains no items of that kind. So — and you can feel the conclusion coming — if ordinary moral claims are committed to a thing that is not there, then ordinary moral claims are false. All of them. Not because the acts they concern are acceptable, but because the thing they report does not exist. The claim reaches for an objective prescription in the way "the witch cursed the milk" reaches for a curse, and comes back holding nothing.
That is the error theory. Error, because Mackie thinks we are all making one: a deep, shared, built-in mistake, woven into the grammar of how we talk about right and wrong. We speak as though we are reporting features of the world. We are not. There are no such features. So the report is false. Every time.
Now, the impulse is to dismiss him. So torturing children is not wrong? That is monstrous, that is the end of the conversation. Hold the impulse for a moment, because you are about to accuse him of something he did not say, and the distance between what he said and what you are about to charge him with is the whole point.
Mackie is not telling you that torture is permitted. He is not telling you to do anything, or to mind anything less, or to feel one degree less than you feel. Be precise about his claim. He is not speaking from inside morality — he is not saying "on reflection, cruelty is fine." He is standing outside the moral sentence, looking at what kind of thing it is, and saying: this sentence, which is trying to report an objective prescription, does not succeed. It aims at a fact, there is no fact, so it does not come out true. That is a claim about the sentence. It is not a claim about the cruelty. You can hold every word of the error theory and still put yourself between the child and the harm. The error theorist can be as brave and as committed as anyone; he simply holds that when he says "that is wrong," he is not stating a fact, because there is no fact of that kind to state. The horror is untouched. The recoil is untouched. What is false, he says, is the small further claim that comes along with it — that there is a prescription out in the world that makes it so — which you did not know you were making.
So separate them, the way the second episode taught you to separate things. There is the conduct — the cruelty, the harm, the ruined child — untouched, real, exactly as bad as it was an hour ago. And there is the claim — "and that is wrong, as a report of an objective fact" — which Mackie says misfires. He is not coming for the first. He is only ever talking about the second.
And here is why the objection you want to make cannot remove him. Your instinct — but it just is wrong, I am certain — Mackie predicted it. Not vaguely; precisely. Go back to the woman with the milk, because you have stood beside her before and you are standing beside her now. She was certain — total, bodily, stake-your-life certain that the curse was real. And her certainty, as we said three episodes ago, was a fact about her. It was produced inside her, by fear and grief and pattern; it was every bit as strong as yours; and it pointed at nothing. So when you answer Mackie with the strength of your conviction — I could not be this sure if there were no fact — you are using her move. You are doing the very thing the second episode taught you not to trust. The strength of a certainty cannot, by itself, tell you whether the thing it points at is there. You already know this; you learned it from her. And Mackie's argument predicts that you will reach for that conviction, that it will feel decisive, and that it can settle nothing — because if the objective prescription were really there you would feel sure of it, and if it were not there you would feel exactly this sure anyway. From the inside, the certainty reads the same either way.
So I am not asking you to give in. Hear this clearly, because the two arguments that follow are hard. I am not saying the wrongness is not there. I have not said that, and I will not. Mackie has not shown that there is no fact — he is about to argue it, in a moment, and his argument carries a real objection the other two views raise against him. The fact-question is still open, both ways: perhaps there is an objective prescription, perhaps there is not. What the woman with the milk removes is one bad way of closing it — I am so certain, therefore it is there. That move is finished. It was finished three episodes ago. All I am doing now is refusing to let you use it against a man who saw it coming.
Here is his first argument, the famous one; once you see it clearly you understand why it has occupied philosophers for fifty years. Mackie calls it the argument from queerness — and "queer" here is the old plain word for strange, strange in a way nothing else is strange. The argument runs like this. Suppose there really were an objective prescription out there, a wrongness built into the act of cruelty, as you have always felt there to be. Ask what kind of thing that would have to be. Ask it slowly, because it is the question from the first episode — show me the wrong — returning with more force.
Everything else in the world, Mackie says, is inert. A rock is a rock; it sits there. The suffering in that recording — the pain, the fear, the damage — is real; all of it is in the world; and all of it is, in this one specific sense, inert: it is a state of affairs, a fact, a thing that is the case. It does not, by itself, reach out and command you. A fact sits there being a fact. But a value — a real, objective wrongness — would have to be something else: a fact that is also, in itself, a command. A to-be-avoided-ness, located in the act, that takes hold of any rational being who sees it clearly and turns them away from it, whatever they wanted, with no need of their wanting. A fact you cannot merely observe — a fact that, simply by being clearly seen, moves you to act. There is nothing else in the universe like that, Mackie says. Nothing else is a piece of the world and an instruction at once. It would be, in his words, an entity, a quality, or a relation utterly unlike anything else there is. And that alone should make you cautious: he is asking you to believe in a single exception to the way everything else works.
Then the second half of the strangeness, which is worse, and which you have already met. Suppose, despite all this, the objective prescription is there. How would you ever know it? Every ordinary fact we learn through some ordinary faculty: we see the colour, hear the sound, feel the heat, work out the sum. By what do we detect a to-be-done-ness? Not the eyes; it has no look. Not the ears; it has no sound. We would need a special faculty, Mackie says — some moral sense, unlike any other sense we have, whose one task is to perceive a kind of thing unlike any other kind of thing. And we have no such faculty. This is exactly the demand the third episode made and could not meet: what in us reaches out and touches a fact that is nowhere and made of nothing? Mackie is the man who first set that demand down. He says we cannot meet it because there is nothing for it to meet — there is no object for the faculty to be a faculty of. We cannot find the faculty because there is nothing of that kind to find.
This is the most forceful argument Mackie makes, and treating it as weak is only the impulse to dismiss him in a more respectable form. Go back once more to the first episode, when I said show me the wrong and your hand came back holding the harm and nothing more — every inert fact that simply sits there being the case, but not the extra thing: the wrongness laid over the harm, the command in the act. Mackie's argument is an explanation of why your hand came back empty. It came back empty, he says, because you were reaching for something that would have to be unlike anything that exists, detectable by a faculty unlike any you have. You did not fail to look hard enough. There was, he says, nothing of that kind to find. That is a serious explanation of the very experience this whole series began from, and it cannot be waved away.
So have I handed you the answer? Is it settled — no fact, he is right, it is all false, and we are finished?
No. And I want to be careful here, because this is the point at which the hour could go wrong, and it should not, because the other two views have not gone anywhere, and they have a cost to hand Mackie that he must pay.
Here is the cost, and it comes straight from the first view, the realists of two episodes ago. It has a name in the literature: companions in guilt — and you have already watched it work. Back with the realists we set moral facts beside mathematics and the rules of reasoning: abstract, found by no sense, and yet binding on you whatever you would prefer to be true. By every test you used to call moral facts strange, those facts are strange too. Now turn it on Mackie. He says objective values are too queer to believe in, because they would be facts that are also commands, detected by no ordinary faculty. Very well — but the same charge falls on arithmetic and logic, and no one throws those out; you cannot even state the argument from queerness without using the very rules of evidence it would have to discard. So either Mackie keeps the strange, abstract, binding things, and loses his grounds for singling out morality; or he throws them all out, and undermines the reasoning he is using. Which is it? Why is morality the one casualty?
That is a real cost, and Mackie owes it, and the people who do this for a living are still arguing, in print, about whether he can meet it. He has replies — perhaps moral facts really are stranger than mathematical ones; perhaps to-be-done-ness is stranger than mere abstractness; perhaps mathematics can be explained some other way. The error theorists who came after him spend much of their effort on exactly this. The point tonight is not who wins. The point is that the realist did not leave when Mackie arrived. The first view still stands, with a serious, unanswered question set down in the middle of Mackie's strongest argument: show why the argument that defeats morality leaves mathematics standing. Until that is settled — and it is not settled — the argument from queerness is a powerful reason to doubt the objective prescription. It is not a proof that there is none. Hold the two apart, as you have held everything apart tonight. A strong argument that carries an unanswered objection is not a verdict. It is a serious challenge waiting to see whether the other side can meet it. And the other side is answering now.
Mackie has a second argument, quieter than the first and, for many people, the more disturbing of the two. He calls it the argument from relativity, though it is really an argument from disagreement, and you can feel its force if you have ever sat at a table where two thoughtful, decent people could not be moved an inch toward each other on something that mattered.
Look, he says, at how moral disagreement behaves. Not the easy cases — nearly everyone condemns the cruelty in that recording. Look at the hard, lasting ones: the disagreements that run between whole cultures and across whole centuries and never resolve, however long the parties talk. Now ask the question a scientist would ask: what is the best explanation of a pattern like that? When people disagree about a fact — the shape of the earth, the cause of a fever — the disagreement tends, over time and with evidence, to close. One side turns out right; the other comes round or dies out; the question gets settled, because there was something there to be right about, and reality eventually bears on everyone the same way. Moral disagreement does not behave like that. It behaves like disagreement over what to value, over how to live — and the cleanest explanation of that is not "one of these ancient cultures has been misperceiving the moral facts for three thousand years." The cleanest explanation is that there are no facts there to misperceive. People's moral views, Mackie says, track their ways of life; they grow out of how a people farms and fights and raises its children and buries its dead. That is what you would expect if morality were invented — made by each people to fit its life — and a strange thing to expect if it were discovered, one truth for all. We do not find different geometries in different valleys. We do find different moralities. Why? Because, he says, the geometry was found and the morality was made.
I want to be careful here, because there is a connected question I am not going to take up tonight. You have felt this before. A long way back, in a different series, you sat with the plain fact that moral arguments never seem to end — that you can argue right and wrong with someone all night and each of you walks away as sure as you began. You felt it as a frustration. Mackie offers a theory of it: the arguments never end because there is nothing there to end them — no fact to settle the matter for both of you. Hold that loosely, because there is someone else, in a series not far from here, who looks at the same never-ending arguments and reads them the opposite way — not "no fact," but something else. That is a question for another time. Tonight, simply notice that the endlessness you had felt as an annoyance is, for Mackie, evidence: evidence that we have been quarrelling over something no one ever made true.
So that is the case: two arguments, queerness and disagreement, both strong, both of which you have felt. And now I know where you want to go, because you have wanted to go there since the first episode, and tonight you feel you have finally been given permission. You want to shrug. You want to say: fine — then it is all made up. It is all just feelings, just human invention, as Mackie says; there is no fact, so it comes to nothing, and I should grow up and stop pretending. You can feel the relief in it: the whole exhausting question collapses into a shrug, and you can go to bed.
I have to take that way out from you, and take it now, because it is a trap — the trap this series has been keeping you from. Two things are wrong with the shrug, and they pull in opposite directions, which is why it is hard to see that both are wrong.
First: "it is all just my feelings." You cannot say that. You yourself killed that sentence in the first episode, and I will not let you revive it now because you are tired. "Wrong means I disapprove" — the flat view, on which your moral claim is only a report of what you feel — cannot even say the thing you mean. Because you mean it would be wrong even if you had been raised to approve; and someone raised to approve, reporting approval, makes no mistake on that theory — and you will not accept that. Your own usage runs past your feelings. So "it is all just feelings" is not a modest retreat to safe ground. It is a view you refuted four episodes ago, before you had heard a single philosopher's name. Mackie does not rescue it; Mackie agrees it is false — that is half his point. The flat "it is just my attitude" reading cannot capture what your moral talk reaches for, which is exactly why he says your moral talk reaches for something larger, the objective prescription, and that is the thing that is not there. The error theorist and the flat subjectivist are not allies. The error theorist thinks the flat subjectivist has misdescribed your sentence.
Second — and this is the one that should stop the shrug outright. "It is all made up" is not one position. It never was. It is a single label laid over two views that are opposed to each other. You met one of them last week: the expressivist — no fact, but keep the truth. There is no fact out there, and your claim is still true, you can still be mistaken, it is still wrong however you were raised, because the word was never resting on a fact in the first place. And you are meeting the other tonight: the error theorist — no fact, so no truth. There is no fact out there, and therefore your claim is false, flatly, because it was trying to report a fact and there was none. The same three words — there is no fact — and then the two views part company completely: keep every truth, or lose every truth. "It is all made up" does not tell you which of the two you mean. It lets you feel you have settled the question when you have only declined to choose between them. To actually take the shrug, you have to commit to one of those two views, and each is a hard, fully worked-out philosophy with a cost of its own. There is no cheap "it is all made up" that pays neither cost. That way out was never real.
So look where that leaves you, because it is stranger than where you wanted to be. You cannot return to the unexamined, obvious fact — the first episode took that. You cannot retreat to "just my feelings" — your own mouth took that. And you cannot escape into "it is all made up" — because that is not a place, it is a choice between two demanding positions, each with its own cost. Every comfortable resting place has been removed, and not one of them by me. You did most of it yourself, weeks ago, without noticing.
One last thing before we close, and it is a cost on Mackie, so the third view does not walk away clean either. The error theorist says all moral claims are false, and then, in the next breath, tends to say something like: so you ought to believe the truth about this, and stop deceiving yourself. But listen to that "ought." You ought to believe the truth. Is that not itself a prescription — an objective one, a real to-be-done about how you should manage your beliefs? If every "ought" that claims to bind you regardless of your wants is false, then the error theorist's own closing line is false too, by his own theory. Perhaps he can escape it — perhaps that "ought" is only a hypothetical: if you want the truth, here is how to get it, with no objective force, and then it survives. The replies exist and they are serious. But notice that the man who tells you every moral word misfires has to be careful that his own last word does not misfire in the same way. Even the man whose whole theory is that these claims fail has to make sure his own claim does not fail with them.
Before I close, run it yourself, the way you have run every view — in your own mouth, on a wrong of your own, because nothing I have said tonight is worth anything until you have felt it on a case that is yours.
Here is a fresh one, a small one, with no torture in it. A man — patient, friendly, good with a cup of tea — spends six months befriending a lonely old widower down the road. He visits. He listens. He learns the names of the dead wife and the grown children who never call. And then, slowly and carefully, he empties the old man's savings — the whole account, the funeral money, all of it — and moves on to the next street a little richer and entirely untroubled. You know what that is. It is wrong. You would stake a great deal on it. Good. Now do what Mackie does.
Go and find the wrongness. First find the harm — that is easy, it is everywhere: the emptied account, the shame, the old man watching the door for a friend who will not come, the particular cruelty of the tea and the listening being part of the theft. All of it is real. All of it is in the world. All of it simply sits there being the case — inert, in Mackie's sense, a state of affairs you could photograph and prove. Now find the other thing. Find the wrongness — not the harm, but the forbiddenness, the objective prescription, the this-was-not-to-be-done built into the act itself, binding on the con man whatever he wanted, present in the world as a standing law. Reach for that. And tell me honestly, saying it yourself: does your hand close on a thing, or does it close on the harm plus your own certainty that it is forbidden? Mackie's wager is that you come back holding two things — the inert harm, and a conviction produced in you, as strong as the milk-woman's and, he says, pointing at nothing. Go and check whether he is right. And then — this is the part that matters — notice what does not happen when you check. You do not, for a second, want to send the con man an apology and a cheque. And here is the thing to look at, whichever way the fact-question comes out: your certainty did not move, and you would still stand between that old man's savings and the man taking them — whether or not your hand ever closed on the wrongness as a fact. Look hard at that gap. Total conviction; no fact you could put in my hand, either way; and not the least temptation to act differently. That is the whole of these five weeks, on a stolen funeral fund, tonight.
Now take stock of where things actually stand, because it is not where you think. You think Mackie has just won. He has not. Here is what is true at the end of the hour, and I will say it plainly, because the temptation to round it off into "so it is all false" is the single most dangerous step you could take, and it would be a lie.
Three views are open, and all three still stand. The realist of two episodes ago has not moved: there is a fact, she says — perhaps a natural one, the suffering itself; perhaps a non-natural one — and she has just handed Mackie an objection he has not answered, the one about mathematics: show why the argument that defeats morality leaves arithmetic standing. The expressivist of last week has not moved either: no fact, she agrees, but the truth survives, and every moral word keeps working, and Mackie is simply wrong that "no fact" means "all false" — he has forgotten that the word was never resting on a fact to begin with. And Mackie stands between them with his two hard arguments and his own unanswered objection, the smuggled "ought." Not one of the three has knocked the others down. The honest picture at the end of the fifth hour is not Mackie is right. It is this: the field is now fully in view — three serious accounts, each strong, each carrying a real debt — and you can no longer stand in the plain, obvious position you started from, because that position, the obvious fact I obviously perceive, is the one that owes the most and answers the least.
So what did move tonight, if not your certainty? Say it carefully. What moved is that the last cheap way out has closed. You came into this hour with one consolation still available — if it gets too hard, I will just shrug and say it is all made up. That consolation is gone now. "Made up" turned out to be two opposed philosophies under one label, and "just my feelings" turned out to be a sentence your own mouth refuses to say. You are out of easy answers. And your conviction — I will put it on the record a fifth time, because the deeper we go the more it can feel as though something is collapsing, and nothing is — your conviction is exactly as firm as it was when you walked in. Torturing a child for fun is wrong. Bleeding a lonely old man dry is wrong. Nothing tonight, and nothing in this whole series, touches that. What it does touch is the quiet story you told yourself about what kind of thing that wrongness is — and that story is now a question with three serious answers and no obvious winner, in place of the one obvious answer you never knew you were assuming.
Which leaves you in front of a question you can no longer un-ask, and I am going to hand it to you and not answer it, because answering it is not tonight's task. Here it is. Your certainty has survived everything — five hours, three views, two hard arguments, a man who says you misfire every time you speak — survived it all, completely intact. So ask the thing that follows: what would actually change, for you, if it turned out Mackie was right — if there were no fact there at all, only the certainty? Would anything in how you live, how you recoil, what you would act to protect — would any of it move? Take that question with you. Not because I know the answer, but because I do not, and neither does the field, and it is the question the rest of this series works through.
Next week, two questions come off the back of it, and I will name them so you can feel them coming, though I will not touch them tonight. The first: suppose the error theorist is right — just suppose, to see where it leads, because he has not won and the other two views are still here — suppose it really is all false. What then? Do you stop talking that way altogether, scrub "wrong" out of your speech as a word that lies? Or do you keep it — knowingly, on purpose, the way you keep a story you know is not literally true because telling it holds you steady? That is a real fork, and it opens only if the third view wins, which is exactly why it is a side question and not the main one. And the second, the larger one, the one I keep turning over: this whole dispute has been about a thing called a moral fact — a binding "wrong, full stop" sitting in the world. Where did that idea come from in the first place? Who built the notion of a fact that commands? Because if it has a history — if "moral fact" was assembled, somewhere, out of older parts — then perhaps the trouble all these views have run into is not that the fact is hard to find. Perhaps it is that we have been looking for the wrong kind of thing all along. That is next week. Bring the question I have just handed you. We are going to ask where the question itself was born.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.