John Leslie Mackie

John Leslie Mackie was a British philosopher known for his defense of moral subjectivism. He argued that moral judgments are not objective truths about the world but rather reflect individual desires and feelings. Mackie challenged the idea that moral language presupposes objective moral features, drawing on David Hume's argument that one cannot derive an "ought" from an "is". He believed that ordinary moral language mistakenly assumes that moral judgments can be true or false, when in reality, they are based on subjective sentiments. Mackie's work, particularly his book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, presented a significant counterpoint to theories like R.M. Hare's universal prescriptivism.12