Abstract
Mackie holds that the widespread but erroneous belief that many of our actions are “objectively prescribed” is the result of the human “tendency to read our feelings into their objects.” He calls this “objectification.” (One might also call it “projectivism.”) This Chapter examines the role that the thesis of moral objectification plays in Mackie's endeavors to establish moral skepticism. I conclude that his well-known skeptical arguments (from relativity and queerness) leave matters undecided, and that a further supplementary thesis must be established in order to “explain away” those pro-morality intuitions that threaten to nullify the skeptical arguments' force (via an application of a principle of epistemological conservatism). Moral objectification is designed to be that supplementary thesis. However, Mackie's arguments in favor of this thesis are weak.
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Cf. Barry Stroud's discussion of Humean projectivism: “We do not think that the sequence of events on the billiards table – the one ball's striking the others and the second ball's moving – itself has a feeling or impression like the feeling Hume says we humans get when we observe it… . Nor do we think that an act of willful murder itself has a feeling of disgust or disapprobation, any more than we think that a painting on a wall has a sentiment of pleasure or awe” (Stroud 2000, p. 22).
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For the curious, I will quickly outline the difficulties of providing a general account of minimal objectification (or “projectivism” as I will call it in this footnote, since I will relate it to subjects for which the latter term is more familiar). An adequate general account of projectivism should cover at least the following cases: (1) moral projectivism, (2) causal projectivism, (3) psychopathological projectivism, and (4) color projectivism. In the interests of illustrating the difficulties of achieving a general account, let me sketch, in the most provisional terms, what these four theories might look like. In moral projectivism, something in the world prompts one to feel disapproval (say), which leads one to experience the thing in the world as forbidden. In causal projectivism, a regularity in the world prompts one to have an expectation, which leads one to experience the world as containing a causal relation. I am not confident that I can give a general account of all forms of psychopathological projectivism, but examples are not hard to come by: A person's poor self-image leads her to interpret her parents as being overly critical or demanding. So far we have three mental states that serve as “intermediaries” between the world and one's experience of the world: disapproval, expectation, and a poor self-image. Yet it is hard to come up with an over-arching category for these three that will not end up capturing too much. And in the case of color projectivism, it is challenging even to come up with an analogous intermediary mental state. The idea is (roughly) that one's visual experience of color owes its quality to the nature of one's sensory apparatus rather than to the real nature of objects' surfaces (even though the sensory apparatus is sensitive to real properties of surfaces). It is not obvious what mental activity is supposed to be getting projected in the creation of one's visual color field. (Visual qualia?) My hunch is that color projectivism can be articulated only as a metaphysical (non-minimal) thesis. It is in light of these kinds of complications that I have sidestepped the delicate task of trying to unify this family of stock examples (and others besides) with a general account, though I confess to harboring the hope of yet doing so in the future. Perhaps in the end there is no entirely satisfactory general account of minimal projection in the offing.
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See Joyce (2009a), where some features of this account (e.g., what might be meant by “objective”) are discussed in more detail.
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Needless to say, Mackie himself won't buy the response-dependent account of moral properties. He criticizes such views in general terms in his 1980 book (Chapter 5); and in his 1973 book (Chapter 4) he doubts even the existence of dispositional properties. It is also doubtful that Hume's multifarious uses of the projectivist metaphor are supposed to be compatible with realism. Stroud (2000) emphasizes how, in Hume's account, the content of projectivist experience – be it causal connection, beauty, color, or virtue – is something that could not even be intelligibly predicated of items in the world. Immediately following the famous Treatise projectivist image of the mind's “great propensity to spread itself on external objects,” Hume declares that sounds and smells “really exist no where” (Hume 1739–1740, 1.3.14.24/1978, p. 167) – and context makes it reasonable to think that he will say the same of color and necessary connection. I discuss the error theoretic commitments lying behind Hume's views in Joyce (forthcoming).
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Freud, remember, categorized this sort of projection as a kind of delusion – indicating an antirealist construal.
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I offer some criticisms of this line of argument – and of Michael Huemer's version of it in particular – in Joyce (2009b).
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Space does not permit an examination of Mackie's arguments for moral objectification found in his 1946 paper. I do not think any of the arguments found there are superior to those problematic ones which I shall discuss.
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Incidentally, this comment reveals that Mackie believes that so long as there exists some possible world at which the requisite kind of supernatural being is real, then the error in morality is but a contingent matter. In his forceful case for atheism in his 1982 book, Mackie repeatedly declares the existence of God to be “improbable” (pp. 100, 130, 252–253) – not impossible.
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Joyce, R. (2010). Patterns of Objectification. In: Joyce, R., Kirchin, S. (eds) A World Without Values. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 114. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3339-0_3
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