J. L. Mackie

John Leslie Mackie was an Australian philosopher. He made significant contributions to ethics, the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language. Mackie had influential views on metaethics, including his defence of moral scepticism and his sophisticated defence of atheism. He wrote six books. His most widely known, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), opens by stating, "There are no objective values." It goes on to argue that because of this, ethics must be invented rather than discovered.