How might Mackie argue against Bambrough?

How might Mackie argue against Bambrough?

J.L. Mackie, a philosopher famous for denying the objectivity of morals, encountered three very different reactions to his claims on the subject. Some, he wrote, found them "not merely false but pernicious". What could be more undeniable than the evilness - the objective, absolute evilness - of the Holocaust, and what could be more pernicious than the denial of this evil? But others who read Mackie, though taking pains to maintain that they abhorred the Nazis as much as the next man, thought his claim that moral judgements such as this were subjective matters "trivial", needing only to be stated to be recognised as true.

These equal and opposite convictions, which can be found whenever people debate the issue (and perhaps even as you consider it yourself), may tempt us to the third view listed by Mackie, namely that the objectivity of morals is not itself an objective question. Perhaps if people can have such different views, there is no right or wrong answer. But to bow out thus would be a mistake, unless we are prepared to take the same attitude to every question where disagreement persists - which I hope we are not. In some of these cases, the philosophers with whom Mackie identifies the third view are right to conclude that the claim in question is meaningless; perhaps to accept it is to express one attitude, to reject it another, but there is no fact of the matter to decide who is right. But in this case I think all we can conclude is that if the claim that morals are objective does have a meaning, it is not well understood.

Our first task, then, should be to see if we can get a better understanding of it, and in doing so put the third position properly behind us. Those who maintain that morals are objective, who I shall call objectivists (at the risk of bringing to mind acolytes of Ayn Rand), are apt to put their view in simple terms. As in the example I gave above, they might cite condemnation of the Holocaust as an objective moral judgement. One thing it does not mean is that moral judgements, values and the like are 'real' in the exact same way that we commonly suppose physical objects to be, perhaps by virtue of being written on a rock handed down from Mt Sinai. Both J.L. Mackie, a subjectivist (or, as he prefers, moral sceptic) and Renford Bambrough, who defends the objectivity of morality, agree on this point. Bambrough correctly dismisses what he calls the 'malign ... idea that objectivity requires an object.'[1]

This idea may, however, account at least partly for the belief in moral subjectivism. Among the many obvious differences between a moral judgement and a tree, a subjectivist might claim that a moral judgement requires a judger and a tree doesn't requires a perceiver. Bambrough's response to this is to point out the difficulties with naäve realism ...