https://jhaponline.org/jhap/issue/feed 2020-05-26T16:02:30-04:00 Marcus Rossberg marcus.rossberg@uconn.edu Open Journal Systems <p>JHAP aims to promote research in and discussion of the history of analytical philosophy. <a href="/jhap/about">Read more ...</a></p> https://jhaponline.org/jhap/article/view/4000 2020-05-26T16:02:30-04:00 Michael Ridge m.ridge@ed.ac.uk

<p>I offer new arguments for an unorthodox reading of J. L.&nbsp;Mackie’s <em>Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong</em>, one on which Mackie does not think all substantive moral claims are false, but allows that a proper subset of them are true. Further, those that are true should be understood in terms of a “hybrid theory”. The proposed reading is one on which Mackie is a conceptual pruner, arguing that we should prune away error-ridden moral claims but hold onto those already free of error. This reading is very different from the standard ones found in the literature. I build on recent work by Moberger and argue that this reading is better corroborated by close attention to the way in which Mackie argues at length that terms like “good” and “ought” are&nbsp;<em>systematically</em> context-sensitive, as well as by considerable additional textual evidence. This reading, however, faces an important challenge—to explain in what sense, if any, morality retains its “normativity” on the proposed reading. I argue that this challenge can be met, at least given some of Mackie’s further assumptions about the nature of rationality.</p>

2020-04-20T11:43:10-04:00 ##submission.copyrightStatement##