Moral Realism (Part 2) J.L. Mackie's Error Theory

On The Very Idea - A Philosophy Podcast

In this second instalment of a three part series focusing on moral realism, I look at J.L. Mackie' s error theory. Mackie argues against the idea that moral facts supporting a moral realist framework could exist on the grounds that morality differs widely across cultures and that moral facts, if they were to exist, would be very strange things indeed. I try to draw out some of the details of his arguments. I also look at the Frege-Geach problem which is the idea that sentences that express moral judgments can form part of semantically complex sentences in a way that an expressivist cannot easily explain. And, I ponder a bit about why philosophers tend to go by their initials. And, I engage in the usual light jabbering and throw in some trivia.