J. L. Mackie

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Lore & Background

Mackie was born in Killara, Sydney, the son of Alexander Mackie, a professor of education at the University of Sydney and principal of the Sydney Teachers College, and Annie Burnett Duncan, a schoolteacher. He attended Knox Grammar School and graduated with dux. He graduated from the University of Sydney in 1938 after studying under John Anderson, sharing the medal in philosophy with Harold Glass. He received the Wentworth Travelling Fellowship to study at Oriel College, Oxford, graduating with first-class honours in 1940. During the Second World War, he served with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers in the Middle East and Italy and was mentioned in dispatches. He was professor of philosophy at the University of Otago in New Zealand from 1955 to 1959 and succeeded Anderson as the Challis Professor of philosophy at the University of Sydney from 1959 to 1963. In 1963, he moved to the United Kingdom, becoming the inaugural holder of the chair of philosophy at the University of York, a position he held until 1967, when he was elected a fellow of University College, Oxford, where he served as praelector. In 1969, he gave a lecture, 'What's Really Wrong with Phenomenalism?', at the British Academy as part of its annual Philosophical Lectures series. In 1974, he became a fellow of the British Academy. Mackie died in Oxford on 12 December 1981. He married Joan Meredith in 1947. One of their three children, Penelope Mackie, also became a philosopher, lecturing at the University of Birmingham and then the University of Nottingham until her death in 2022. His son David is also a philosopher, holding lectureships at Exeter College, Corpus Christi College, and Christ Church before becoming a Fellow and Tutor at Oriel College, and is Head of Philosophy at D'Overbroeck's College, Oxford. His daughter Hilary is a classicist at Rice University. Mackie is said to have been capable of expressing total disagreement in such a genial way that the person being addressed might mistake his comment for a compliment. This personal style is exemplified by the preface to Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, where he wrote, 'I am nowhere mainly concerned to refute any individual writer. I believe that all those to whom I have referred, even those with whom I disagree most strongly, have contributed significantly to our understanding of ethics: where I have quoted their actual words, it is because they have presented views or arguments more clearly or more forcefully than I could put them myself.'

Reader's Guide

Mackie is best known for his contributions to metaethics, philosophy of religion, and metaphysics. In metaethics, he took a position called moral scepticism, arguing against the objective existence of right and wrong as intrinsically normative entities on fundamental grounds. His most widely known work, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, bluntly begins with the sentence 'There are no objective values.' He uses several arguments to support this claim, including that some aspects of moral thought are relative, that objective morals require an absurd intrinsic action-guiding feature, and most of all, that it is very unclear how objective values could supervene on features of the natural world (the Argument from queerness). He also argues it would be difficult to justify our knowledge of 'value entities' or account for any links or consequences they would have, and that people could be mistaken or fooled into believing objective values exist. The Times called the book 'a lucid discussion of moral theory which, although aimed at the general reader, has attracted a good deal of professional attention.' In philosophy of religion, he was well known for vigorously defending atheism and arguing that the problem of evil made untenable the main monotheistic religions. In 1955 he published 'Evil and Omnipotence', which summarized his view that belief in the existence of evil and an all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good god is 'positively irrational.' His posthumously published The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God (1982) has been called a tour de force in contemporary analytic philosophy. The atheist philosopher Kai Nielsen described it as 'one of the most, probably the most, distinguished articulation of an atheistic point of view given in the twentieth century.' In 1980, Time magazine described him as 'perhaps the ablest of today's atheistic philosophers.' In metaphysics, Mackie made significant contributions relating to the nature of causal relationships, especially conditional statements describing them and the notion of an INUS condition. In The Cement of the Universe: A Study of Causation, he argued that a cause is an 'INUS condition' (insufficient but non-redundant parts of a condition which is itself unnecessary but sufficient for the occurrence of the effect). For example, the statement 'The short circuit caused the fire' means the short circuit is a necessary part of the fire condition (short circuit and flammable material) but not sufficient, and this condition is sufficient for a fire although not necessary. Mackie's views on the logical problem of evil prompted Alvin Plantinga to respond with the 'free-will defense', which Mackie later responded to in The Miracle of Theism. After being given a copy of Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene as a Christmas present, in 1978 Mackie wrote an article in the journal Philosophy praising the book and discussing how its ideas might be applied to moral philosophy. The philosopher Mary Midgley responded in 1979 with 'Gene-Juggling', starting a dispute between Mackie, Midgley, and Dawkins that was ongoing at the time of Mackie's death.

Did You Know?

• Mackie graduated from the University of Sydney in 1938, sharing the medal in philosophy with Harold Glass.
• During the Second World War, he served with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers in the Middle East and Italy and was mentioned in dispatches.
• He was the inaugural holder of the chair of philosophy at the University of York from 1963 to 1967.
• In 1978, after receiving a copy of Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene as a Christmas present, Mackie wrote an article in Philosophy praising the book, which led to a dispute with Mary Midgley and Dawkins.
• Mackie's daughter Penelope Mackie also became a philosopher, lecturing at the University of Birmingham and the University of Nottingham until her death in 2022.