A Study of J.L. Mackie's Error Theory in Meta-ethics Based on Ayatollah JawadiAmoli's Views

In his renowned book on the philosophy of religion called “Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong”, J.L. Mackie has presented a skeptical stance. Based on this standpoint, since religious rules and propositions are dependent upon the objectivity of the ethical values and truths, and because these have been repudiated for two main reasons of ‘peculiarity of ethical truths’ and ‘relativity of ethical values’, such ethical rules are regarded as untrue. Mackie has called this standpoint of his as put forward in this book ‘The Error Theory’. This research is an attempt to examine and critique this standpoint based on the views of Muslim scholars including Ayatollah Jawadi Amoli. Clearly, for Muslim scholars, ethical truths are realities that are described using abstract concepts of secondary philosophical intelligibles’ kind. From this perspective, the existence of these issues in the world is explicable the way that the existence of realities of abstract nature is explained.