ABSTRACT
‘Protagoras, Hobbes, Hume and Warnock’, writes John Mackie, ‘are all at least broadly in agreement about the problem that morality is needed to solve: limited resources and limited sympathies together generate both competition leading to conflict and an absence of what would be mutually beneficial cooperation’ (Mackie 1977: 111). Mackie endorses this view, meaning by ‘morality’ what he calls morality ‘in the narrow sense’, namely, ‘a system of a particular sort of constraints on conduct—ones whose central task is to protect the interests of persons other than the agent and which present themselves to an agent as checks on his natural inclinations or spontaneous tendencies to act’ (ibid.: 106). In this paper, I shall seek to establish three conclusions: first, thatMackie's account of morality ‘in the narrow sense’ is useful and important, and denotes a central domain within morality more widely construed; second, that his account of the problem to which morality, thus conceived, is a solution is inadequate and misleading; and third, that it is importantly so.
