Abstract
John P. Burgess has remarked that Mackie: “even though he talks of the need to
invent morality … does not seem to think that this proposal could be worked into
a revisionary meta-ethic”. In the first part of my paper, I argue that Mackie
did propose a revisionary meta-ethic (conceptual reformism), and
that Mackie was not a preservatist, abolitionist, or semantic pluralist. I also
argue that interpreting Mackie as a conceptual reformist enables us to overcome a
number of standard objections to his error theory. The upshot is that we should take
seriously the idea that Mackie was a conceptual reform moral error theorist.