"The Argument from Queerness" is a term used by J. L. Mackie in his book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong to describe a certain sort of reductio ad absurdum that he uses against moral objectivism; he argues that "if there were objective values, then they would be entities of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe", and that this in itself is sufficient reason for doubting their existence. The same sort of argument could be applied to other supposed unperceivable entities, such as a God or gods, a soul or "self" or free will. John Leslie Mackie (1917–1981) was a philosopher, originally from Sydney, Australia. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Moral objectivism is the position that certain acts are objectively right or wrong, independent of human opinion. ... This article discusses the term God in the context of monotheism and henotheism. ... The soul, according to many religious and philosophical traditions, is a self-aware ethereal substance particular to a unique living being. ... Free will is the philosophical doctrine that holds that our choices are ultimately up to ourselves. ...
Criticisms of the argument include noting that for the very fact that such entities would have to be something fundamentally different from what we normally experience - and therefore assumably outside our sphere of experience - we cannot prima facie have reason to either doubt or affirm their existence; therefore, if one had independent grounds for supposing such things to exist (such as, for instance, a reductio ad absurdum of the contrary) then the argument from queerness cannot give you any particular reason to think otherwise.
Christine Korsgaard's response is also apt: "Of course there are entities that meet these criteria. It's true that they are queer sorts of entities and that knowing them isn't like anything else. But that doesn't mean that they don't exist.... For it is the most familiar fact of human life that the world contains entities that can tell us what to do and make us do it. They are people, and the other animals." (The Sources of Normativity, 1996) Chris Marion Korsgaard is a professor at Harvard University. ...
I propose a version of this argument that employs a broad conception of self-worth, a virtue found in a wide range of moral traditions that suppose a person would have an appropriate sense of self-worth in the face of tendencies both to overestimate and underestimate the value of one’s self.
In general form, the argument is based on the contention that persons are unlikely to have moral knowledge insofar as they lack certain moral virtues; it continues with the claim that persons are commonly deficient in these virtues, and it concludes that they are regularly unlikely to have adequate moral knowledge.
By contrast, the argument here is drawn from considerations that are internal to many moral traditions, namely those that have reason to regard self-worth as a virtue, to think its absence tends to preclude moral knowledge, and to believe self-worth is difficult to achieve.
As with other non-objectivist models of morality, non-cognitivism is largely supported by the argument from queerness: ethical properties, if they existed, would be different from any other thing in the universe, since they have no observable effect on the world.
A similar argument against non-cognitivism is that of ethical argument.
A common argument might be, "If killing an innocent human is always wrong, and all fetuses are innocent humans, then killing a fetus is always wrong." Most people would consider such an utterance to represent an analytic proposition which is true a priori.
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