The Magnetism of the Good and Ethical Realism Essay -- Philosophy Good

The Magnetism of the Good and Ethical Realism ABSTRACT: Ethical antirealists believe the words ‘good’ and ‘bad’, and ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, do not signify properties that objects and actions have or might have. They believe that when a person calls pain or any other event ‘bad’ and adultery or any other action ‘wrong’, he does not report some fact about that object or action. J. L. Mackie defends ethical anti-realism in part by appealing to an ontological queerness he believes value properties would have if they existed. "If there were objective values," Mackie writes, "they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe." (1) Goodness would have a queer magnetic power. "Something's being good both tells the person who knows this to pursue it and makes him pursue it. An objective good would be sought by anyone who was acquainted with it, not because of any contingent fact that this person, or every person, is so constituted that he desires this end, but just because the end has to-be-pursuedness somehow built into it," Mackie says. If there were a property of the sort we conceive of good as being, it would be a queer property—one we cannot reasonably believe exists, Mackie argues. "Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim." Aristotle "To the rational animal the same act is according to nature and according to reason." Marcus Aurelius In this paper I address and overturn the above argument from ontological queerness against value-realism that Mackie uses in the quoted passage. I argue as follows: thou... ...inted with good properties of those objects is contingent on some fact about the nature of people. Thus there are two parts to the explanation of why people want and seek pleasure and other goods. First, it is the nature of an object’s being good that the object has a property which, when people are aware of it, provides them, in certain circumstances, reason to desire, seek and choose that object. Second, members of intelligent species are disposed by nature to form desires in response to reason and to act for reasons. A person’s intelligence consists in part in a disposition to form desires for, and to seek, objects that have properties that provide him with reason to desire and seek that object. A person’s intelligence directs him toward what there is reason to desire. Notes (1) Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977) p. 38.