John Leslie Mackie

John Leslie Mackie was an Australian philosopher who made significant contributions to ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of language. He was known for his views on moral scepticism, atheism, the problem of evil, causation, and the interpretation of Locke and Hume. Mackie was born in Sydney on 25 August 1917, the son of Alexander Mackie, a professor of education and principal of the Sydney Teachers College, and Annie Burnett Duncan Mackie, a schoolteacher. He graduated from the University of Sydney in 1938 with first-class honours in Greek and Latin and a scholarship in philosophy. He studied under John Anderson, a Scottish realist philosopher who influenced his later views. He received the Wentworth Travelling Fellowship to study at Oriel College, Oxford, where he graduated with first-class honours in Literae Humaniores in 1940. During the Second World War, Mackie served with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers in the Middle East and Italy, and was mentioned in dispatches. He returned to Sydney in 1946 as a lecturer in moral and political philosophy. In 1947, he married Joan Meredith, a civil servant. They had five children: Penny, Catriona, Fiona, David and Charles Mackie. In 1955, Mackie became the professor of philosophy and psychology at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He returned to Sydney in 1959 to succeed Anderson as the Challis Professor of Philosophy. He introduced contemporary analytic philosophy to Sydney and engaged in debates with other philosophers such as A. J. Ayer, R. M. Hare, P. F. Strawson, and G. E. Moore. In 1963, Mackie moved to the United Kingdom as the inaugural professor of philosophy at the University of York. In 1967, he was elected a fellow and tutor in philosophy at University College, Oxford. He became a fellow of the British Academy in 1974 and a university reader in 1978. Mackie wrote six books and many articles on various philosophical topics. His most widely known book is Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), which opens with the bold statement: "There are no objective values." He argues that moral values are not part of the fabric of reality but are invented by human beings as expressions of their attitudes and emotions. He defends a form of moral scepticism that he calls "error theory", which claims that all moral judgments are false because they presuppose the existence of objective values that do not exist. Another influential book by Mackie is The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God (1982), which was published posthumously. In this book, he examines the traditional arguments for and against the existence of God and concludes that they are all unsound or inconclusive. He also discusses the problem of evil, which he considers to be a decisive argument against the existence of an omnipotent and wholly good God. Mackie also made contributions to metaphysics, especially on the topics of causation, counterfactuals, space and time, identity, substance, universals, and modality. He developed a regularity theory of causation that rejects any notion of causal necessity or power as metaphysically obscure or mysterious. He also proposed a conditional analysis of counterfactuals that avoids some paradoxes of Lewis's possible worlds semantics. Mackie was also interested in the history of philosophy and wrote books on Locke (Problems from Locke , 1976) and Hume (Hume's Moral Theory , 1980). He interpreted Locke as a precursor of empiricism and Hume as a precursor of naturalism. He defended Hume's moral theory as a form of subjectivism that combines reason and sentiment. Mackie was a clear and rigorous thinker who always sought to expose and resolve philosophical problems. He was also a genial and generous person who could express disagreement in a polite and respectful manner. He died of cancer on 12 December 1981 in Oxford. He was cremated at the Oxford Crematorium and his ashes were scattered in the garden of remembrance.