Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (G.E.M. Anscombe) was an
influential philosopher whose work on Ethics and Action Theory, among
other topics, has had a lasting effect on contemporary philosophy. Born
in Limerick, Ireland, Anscombe was a devout Roman Catholic who (along
with her husband, Peter Geach) became one of Wittgenstein's closest
students and friends. She was an executor of Wittgenstein's literature--
translating, collating and editing much of it including the
posthumously published classic, Philosophical Investigations (1953). She
also wrote an important introduction to his earlier classic, The
Tractatus, which, in many editions, replaced the older intro by Bertrand
Russell about which Wittgenstein always had a low opinion.
This post concerns Anscombe's important paper, Modern Moral Philosophy (1958) which in many ways altered the contours of Moral Theory, at least in the English speaking world. The essay advances 3 major theses:
1) Without belief in God, the term/concept "ought" has no applicability, as it only makes sense in the context of an appeal to an authority which can serve as a legislator over-above individuals and groups.
2) Almost all British work in Ethics including Kantian ethics (deontology) and Utilitarianism (consequentialism) is equally incoherent. Deontology (the ethics of duty or deon) and consequentialism (ethical systems that obligate us to do that which results in maximally beneficial consequences) both turn on the concept of obligation which breaks down in the absence of divine or transcendent authority. Further, consequentialism (a term Anscombe coined) makes the claim that even the most reprehensible acts can be understood as "good" if they produce desirable results. We have an obligation to commit such acts on this view, which she rejects. On the other hand, Kantian ethics assigns the role of moral authority to each putatively rational subject or ego without appeal to an existing divine or transcendent authority, which, once again leads to the misapplication of the concept, obiligation. At bottom, then, both suffer from the same problem.
3) If we cannot or do not return to religiously based ethics then we must develop a moral psychology which can provide a good account of such things as action, intention, virtue, justice and facts about that ill-defined concept, human nature. For if that is possible (a controversial question in itself) then we can overcome the impasse of consequentialism and Kantian deontology by returning to Aristotelian or Neo-Aristotelian Virtue Ethics (a move many subsequent philosophers --e.g. Alisdair MacIntyre, Phillipa Foot, Martha Nussbaum et al.-- have made).
*********************************
When one says that a moral agent "ought" to do such-and-such (or refrain from such action), she is appealing to the existence of a legislative authority which issues commands and demands obedience. Terms like "ought," "moral obligation" and "duty" are survivals from Europe's Judaeo-Christian heritage in which they were originally embedded. Once detached from that realm and justified in secular terms they collapse into incoherence as can be seen by analyzing both consequentialism (acts are good or bad only in connection to likely beneficial outcomes) and Kantian deontology ("rational" self-reflection enables each individual to be a moral authority regarding obligation, such that she can play the role of moral legislator and thus be autonomous).
Consequentialism is rejected because it results in the conclusion that acts we hold to be (and for Anscombe are objectively) reprehensible (e.g. killing innocents) be condoned as "good" if they serve some "greater good." Suppose a psycho-killer holds a gun to a group of hostages and says to you that you can save the other hostages if you agree to murder one member of the group. If there are 20 hostages, you can save 19 by agreeing to kill one of them with your own hands. Does the ratio of lives lost to lives saved make the act of killing an innocent person "good?" Anscombe, as an absolutist, says that killing innocents is wrong intrinsically. One reason for this is that any act which includes the intention to kill an innocent person is wrong by definition, and she does not think one can separate the intention from the act itself. (For a short article on her work on intentions see https://historyofwomenphilosophers.org/ecc/#hwps and click on "philosophers" and then on "G.E.M. Anscombe -- this is a new and promising site focusing on women in the history of philosophy! )
Further, consequentialists claim that the good is tantamount to the realization of pleasure as opposed to classical ideals such as the flourishing of individuals and societies, or the attainment of wisdom. But even the attempt to reduce morality to the maximization of pleasure fails, according to Anscombe. Using the above example, it seems very unlikely that somebody who chooses to kill one person to save 19 thereby realizes "pleasure." Nor does it seem right to claim that the 19 would-be victims take "pleasure" in their being spared. Even to speak of such an act in terms of diminishing suffering (as if these are quantities) overlooks all the intricacies of human psychology (e.g. witnessing such an "altruistic" execution might leave some or all of the others badly traumatized, perhaps to the point of suffering PTSD, survivor's guilt, and many other potentially life shattering problems which cannot be quantified). Instead of facing these problems and limits, utilitarians tend to fall back on problematic notions of "rational interests" "cost-benefit analysis" and "preferences." The idea that self-interest, utility and preference overlap reliably with that which is good, thinks Anscombe, is untenable.
Kantian deontology (morality based on the individual subject's apprehension of duty) is also rejected. The reasoning subject, in the absence of a divine legislator of morality, cannot serve as the source and guarantor of what is right and wrong in each and every case (i.e. universally) as Kant holds. Again, talk of "obligation" is a carry-over from the theological domain in which my failure to do X makes me answerable to a higher authority and external rules and constraints I recognize as binding. Self-reflection and appeals to Reason as a subjectively realized abstraction cannot play the role that a transcendent being or God plays in religion. Being obligated to do X based on my own reasoning is a very faint echo of the original notion of moral duty in the religious tradition/s.
Without belief in God our moral concepts lose meaning. We vacillate between consequentialism and talk of duties (deontology) without noticing the vacuum at the center of all this discourse. We alternate between appeals to utility and outcomes on the one hand, and objective rightness on the other. We tend to hold that it is just wrong, simpliciter, to kill little children or defraud innocent investors out of all their savings in a Ponzi scheme. These moral intuitions may seem self-evident but in the absence of a higher legislative authority and guarantor they can and do breakdown (e.g. during total war).
Indeed this type of problem made Anscombe famous when she objected to Oxford University awarding an honorary degree to Harry S. Truman, who as President of the US had committed an act that included the intention to kill countless innocent Japenese men, women and children because it served a"greater good" (i.e. ending the war, saving American lives, insuring the surrender of the Japanese et al.). None of these qualifications could ever make mass murder by one's own hands (signing an order for someone to drop atom bombs) "good," according to Anscombe, who wrote a pamphlet to that effect http://www.ifac.univ-nantes.fr/IMG/pdf/Anscombe-truman.pdf . So, again, without God (or, perhaps a transcendent equivalent) there can be no coherent talk of rightness, wrongness, obligation , duty and other such terms.
What are we to do if neither Kantianism or Utilitarianism can serve as moral paradigms in a secular world? Well, according to Anscombe, if we don't return to religious ethics then the only alternative that makes sense is to develop a moral psychology which might provide us with the requisite insights into the meaning and structure of action, intention, and the poorly defined concept of human nature. We would also have to elucidate the meanings of such concepts as justice and virtue in order to have a robust Virtue Ethic. She explores the possibility of returning to an Aristotelian or Neo-Aristotelian model of virtue ethics in this context. Why Aristototelian virtue ethics? It is impossible to do more than make a few pertinent points here in answer to that question.
Basically, ancient virtue ethics is concerned with the character traits that make a person good rather than evaluating actions in and of themselves. Utilitarians ask how we should act in specific situations in order to produce the best result and not what kind of persons we should strive to become. Deontologists are concerned with identifying the right thing to do, that which we have a duty to do if we want to be moral. But according to the Aristotelian theory of virtue ,what we want is a flexible and context-sensitive ethic in which the moral status of traits and habits are judged in slightly different ways for different people. For example, a fire- fighter or warrior will probably want to cultivate the virtue of courage in a way that differs from an artisan or poet. What counts as virtue in one context (being called to fight fires or battles) is going to look different from that which is courageous in the sphere of civilian life as an artist. Just as a Sumo wrestler needs more protein in his diet to do his job, a warrior needs to fear fewer dangerous situations than an artisan to flourish successfully in his role. As a rule of thumb, for Aristotle, we can say that courage is that character trait that lies midway between being too fearful on the one hand, and being a reckless daredevil scared of nothing on the other. The extremes (cowardice and foolishness, respectively) are both vices; they miss the mark of virtuous conduct. But just where the golden mean or mid-point lies for people in different walks of life will vary. Such context-sensitivity does not amount to moral or epistemological relativism, an important point in Anscombe's discussion (she was very critical of the moral relativism/ non-cognitivism that was so prevalent among positivists and analytic philosophers in the mid 20th century).
In order to do anything that's not superficial in Virtue Ethics, philosophers would need first to establish many facts about the human condition that would be necessary to delineate criteria for what might count as virtue in different contexts. Does virtuous action require, for example, that we intend to practice the given virtue/s? Yes, thinks Anscombe. So we need a theory that sheds light on the concept of intentions. We would need to understand exactly what it is that makes acts virtuous since we know it's not going to be reducible to duty or that which brings about beneficial outcomes. To put it somewhat simplistically, what is required for a promising virtue ethic is an entire moral psychology; a clear understanding of moral agents that would be robust and detailed enough to carry the weight that concepts like obligation and the greatest good have been carrying in the absence of religion in the modern period. Anscombe does not seem sanguine about prospects for such a theory. Still, some would argue that her demand for such a theory is itself unwarranted and that we can, and often do, live virtuously without any such fleshed out moral psychology. These controversies notwithstanding, the paper has served as a spur to many who work in virtue ethics without claiming to have detailed theories of human nature worked out.
Many philosophers read Modern Moral Philosophy as an inducement to such projects. But it is not clear that she was actually recommending virtue ethics in the absence of religion, and there is some controversy on the matter as can be seen in this article at Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy (section 5.1) https://plato.stanford.edu/...
Very briefly stated, some philosophers have concluded that it is possible and desirable to return to Aristotelian notions of practical reason and virtue which don't rely on the divine. They often read Anscombe as encouraging just such a move. Then there are others who emphasize Anscombe's discussion of the difficulty of articulating a reliable and cogent theory of virtue, vice, the structure of human action, the nature of intention (on which she wrote a very important book) and a model of human nature-- all of which she seems to think necessary for a viable virtue ethics to get off the ground. The prevalent reading has been the former, and thus Anscombe is often credited with inspiring the 20th century revival of virtue ethics. But there are also good reasons for thinking that she was trying to show that it is NOT possible to go back to virtue ethics because we simply can't fathom human nature, virtue, vice, emotions and the structure of human action in anything like a synoptic or comprehensive way without Christianity. The only comprehensive source of authority that she countenanced, on this view, is God. This interpretation makes sense since Anscombe was a virtue ethicist as well as a devout Roman Catholic.
Yet whatever her own position on the matter may have been, in effect she opened the door to a virtue ethics revival-- a door that many and sundry philosophers have walked through (e.g. the neo-Thomist,Alisdair MacIntyre and Phillipa Foot,whose virtue ethics does not involve the appeal to God or the divine). In sum, by criticizing the predominant paradigms in normative ethics in the English speaking world (Kantian deontology and conseqentialism ), and exploring the possibility of a secular alternative in virtue ethics, Anscombe contributed mightily to contemporary ethics. She also contributed mightily to Wittgenstein-studies, theories of intention and action, philosophical psychology and Catholic ethics. Though this post is confined to her impact on contemporary ethics, her other work is also well worth exploring.
Below is a good and very short (6 minute) video summary of the essay under discussion here, i.e. Anscombe's Modern Moral Philosophy:
Possible Questions/Issues:
Is objective morality possible without appeal to a higher authority such as God?
Do you think we need universally applicable standards in order to be moral agents?
Would you murder one person with your own hands in order to (hopefully) stop a psycho-killer from murdering 5 people? Explain your reasons either way.
Recommended Readings:
Human Life, Action and Ethics: Essays by G.E.M Anscombe, ed. Mary Geach and Luke Gormally; Imprint Academia, 2005
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online): entry on Anscombe here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anscombe/
Modern Moral Philosophy (G.E.M. Anscombe): https://philosophy.uncc.edu/
Encyclopedia of Concise Concepts by Women Philosophers: (entry on Anscombe's philosophy of intention can be found here: https://historyofwomenphilosophers.org/ecc/#hwps
Summary of Phillipa Foot's version of Virtue Ethics Foot was a colleague of Anscombe's at Oxford in the 50s. She developed an influential secular virtue ethics (unlike Anscombe she was an atheist).
https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/ngier/103/VE103.htm
This post concerns Anscombe's important paper, Modern Moral Philosophy (1958) which in many ways altered the contours of Moral Theory, at least in the English speaking world. The essay advances 3 major theses:
1) Without belief in God, the term/concept "ought" has no applicability, as it only makes sense in the context of an appeal to an authority which can serve as a legislator over-above individuals and groups.
2) Almost all British work in Ethics including Kantian ethics (deontology) and Utilitarianism (consequentialism) is equally incoherent. Deontology (the ethics of duty or deon) and consequentialism (ethical systems that obligate us to do that which results in maximally beneficial consequences) both turn on the concept of obligation which breaks down in the absence of divine or transcendent authority. Further, consequentialism (a term Anscombe coined) makes the claim that even the most reprehensible acts can be understood as "good" if they produce desirable results. We have an obligation to commit such acts on this view, which she rejects. On the other hand, Kantian ethics assigns the role of moral authority to each putatively rational subject or ego without appeal to an existing divine or transcendent authority, which, once again leads to the misapplication of the concept, obiligation. At bottom, then, both suffer from the same problem.
3) If we cannot or do not return to religiously based ethics then we must develop a moral psychology which can provide a good account of such things as action, intention, virtue, justice and facts about that ill-defined concept, human nature. For if that is possible (a controversial question in itself) then we can overcome the impasse of consequentialism and Kantian deontology by returning to Aristotelian or Neo-Aristotelian Virtue Ethics (a move many subsequent philosophers --e.g. Alisdair MacIntyre, Phillipa Foot, Martha Nussbaum et al.-- have made).
*********************************
When one says that a moral agent "ought" to do such-and-such (or refrain from such action), she is appealing to the existence of a legislative authority which issues commands and demands obedience. Terms like "ought," "moral obligation" and "duty" are survivals from Europe's Judaeo-Christian heritage in which they were originally embedded. Once detached from that realm and justified in secular terms they collapse into incoherence as can be seen by analyzing both consequentialism (acts are good or bad only in connection to likely beneficial outcomes) and Kantian deontology ("rational" self-reflection enables each individual to be a moral authority regarding obligation, such that she can play the role of moral legislator and thus be autonomous).
Consequentialism is rejected because it results in the conclusion that acts we hold to be (and for Anscombe are objectively) reprehensible (e.g. killing innocents) be condoned as "good" if they serve some "greater good." Suppose a psycho-killer holds a gun to a group of hostages and says to you that you can save the other hostages if you agree to murder one member of the group. If there are 20 hostages, you can save 19 by agreeing to kill one of them with your own hands. Does the ratio of lives lost to lives saved make the act of killing an innocent person "good?" Anscombe, as an absolutist, says that killing innocents is wrong intrinsically. One reason for this is that any act which includes the intention to kill an innocent person is wrong by definition, and she does not think one can separate the intention from the act itself. (For a short article on her work on intentions see https://historyofwomenphilosophers.org/ecc/#hwps and click on "philosophers" and then on "G.E.M. Anscombe -- this is a new and promising site focusing on women in the history of philosophy! )
Further, consequentialists claim that the good is tantamount to the realization of pleasure as opposed to classical ideals such as the flourishing of individuals and societies, or the attainment of wisdom. But even the attempt to reduce morality to the maximization of pleasure fails, according to Anscombe. Using the above example, it seems very unlikely that somebody who chooses to kill one person to save 19 thereby realizes "pleasure." Nor does it seem right to claim that the 19 would-be victims take "pleasure" in their being spared. Even to speak of such an act in terms of diminishing suffering (as if these are quantities) overlooks all the intricacies of human psychology (e.g. witnessing such an "altruistic" execution might leave some or all of the others badly traumatized, perhaps to the point of suffering PTSD, survivor's guilt, and many other potentially life shattering problems which cannot be quantified). Instead of facing these problems and limits, utilitarians tend to fall back on problematic notions of "rational interests" "cost-benefit analysis" and "preferences." The idea that self-interest, utility and preference overlap reliably with that which is good, thinks Anscombe, is untenable.
Kantian deontology (morality based on the individual subject's apprehension of duty) is also rejected. The reasoning subject, in the absence of a divine legislator of morality, cannot serve as the source and guarantor of what is right and wrong in each and every case (i.e. universally) as Kant holds. Again, talk of "obligation" is a carry-over from the theological domain in which my failure to do X makes me answerable to a higher authority and external rules and constraints I recognize as binding. Self-reflection and appeals to Reason as a subjectively realized abstraction cannot play the role that a transcendent being or God plays in religion. Being obligated to do X based on my own reasoning is a very faint echo of the original notion of moral duty in the religious tradition/s.
Without belief in God our moral concepts lose meaning. We vacillate between consequentialism and talk of duties (deontology) without noticing the vacuum at the center of all this discourse. We alternate between appeals to utility and outcomes on the one hand, and objective rightness on the other. We tend to hold that it is just wrong, simpliciter, to kill little children or defraud innocent investors out of all their savings in a Ponzi scheme. These moral intuitions may seem self-evident but in the absence of a higher legislative authority and guarantor they can and do breakdown (e.g. during total war).
Indeed this type of problem made Anscombe famous when she objected to Oxford University awarding an honorary degree to Harry S. Truman, who as President of the US had committed an act that included the intention to kill countless innocent Japenese men, women and children because it served a"greater good" (i.e. ending the war, saving American lives, insuring the surrender of the Japanese et al.). None of these qualifications could ever make mass murder by one's own hands (signing an order for someone to drop atom bombs) "good," according to Anscombe, who wrote a pamphlet to that effect http://www.ifac.univ-nantes.fr/IMG/pdf/Anscombe-truman.pdf . So, again, without God (or, perhaps a transcendent equivalent) there can be no coherent talk of rightness, wrongness, obligation , duty and other such terms.
What are we to do if neither Kantianism or Utilitarianism can serve as moral paradigms in a secular world? Well, according to Anscombe, if we don't return to religious ethics then the only alternative that makes sense is to develop a moral psychology which might provide us with the requisite insights into the meaning and structure of action, intention, and the poorly defined concept of human nature. We would also have to elucidate the meanings of such concepts as justice and virtue in order to have a robust Virtue Ethic. She explores the possibility of returning to an Aristotelian or Neo-Aristotelian model of virtue ethics in this context. Why Aristototelian virtue ethics? It is impossible to do more than make a few pertinent points here in answer to that question.
Basically, ancient virtue ethics is concerned with the character traits that make a person good rather than evaluating actions in and of themselves. Utilitarians ask how we should act in specific situations in order to produce the best result and not what kind of persons we should strive to become. Deontologists are concerned with identifying the right thing to do, that which we have a duty to do if we want to be moral. But according to the Aristotelian theory of virtue ,what we want is a flexible and context-sensitive ethic in which the moral status of traits and habits are judged in slightly different ways for different people. For example, a fire- fighter or warrior will probably want to cultivate the virtue of courage in a way that differs from an artisan or poet. What counts as virtue in one context (being called to fight fires or battles) is going to look different from that which is courageous in the sphere of civilian life as an artist. Just as a Sumo wrestler needs more protein in his diet to do his job, a warrior needs to fear fewer dangerous situations than an artisan to flourish successfully in his role. As a rule of thumb, for Aristotle, we can say that courage is that character trait that lies midway between being too fearful on the one hand, and being a reckless daredevil scared of nothing on the other. The extremes (cowardice and foolishness, respectively) are both vices; they miss the mark of virtuous conduct. But just where the golden mean or mid-point lies for people in different walks of life will vary. Such context-sensitivity does not amount to moral or epistemological relativism, an important point in Anscombe's discussion (she was very critical of the moral relativism/ non-cognitivism that was so prevalent among positivists and analytic philosophers in the mid 20th century).
In order to do anything that's not superficial in Virtue Ethics, philosophers would need first to establish many facts about the human condition that would be necessary to delineate criteria for what might count as virtue in different contexts. Does virtuous action require, for example, that we intend to practice the given virtue/s? Yes, thinks Anscombe. So we need a theory that sheds light on the concept of intentions. We would need to understand exactly what it is that makes acts virtuous since we know it's not going to be reducible to duty or that which brings about beneficial outcomes. To put it somewhat simplistically, what is required for a promising virtue ethic is an entire moral psychology; a clear understanding of moral agents that would be robust and detailed enough to carry the weight that concepts like obligation and the greatest good have been carrying in the absence of religion in the modern period. Anscombe does not seem sanguine about prospects for such a theory. Still, some would argue that her demand for such a theory is itself unwarranted and that we can, and often do, live virtuously without any such fleshed out moral psychology. These controversies notwithstanding, the paper has served as a spur to many who work in virtue ethics without claiming to have detailed theories of human nature worked out.
Many philosophers read Modern Moral Philosophy as an inducement to such projects. But it is not clear that she was actually recommending virtue ethics in the absence of religion, and there is some controversy on the matter as can be seen in this article at Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy (section 5.1) https://plato.stanford.edu/...
Very briefly stated, some philosophers have concluded that it is possible and desirable to return to Aristotelian notions of practical reason and virtue which don't rely on the divine. They often read Anscombe as encouraging just such a move. Then there are others who emphasize Anscombe's discussion of the difficulty of articulating a reliable and cogent theory of virtue, vice, the structure of human action, the nature of intention (on which she wrote a very important book) and a model of human nature-- all of which she seems to think necessary for a viable virtue ethics to get off the ground. The prevalent reading has been the former, and thus Anscombe is often credited with inspiring the 20th century revival of virtue ethics. But there are also good reasons for thinking that she was trying to show that it is NOT possible to go back to virtue ethics because we simply can't fathom human nature, virtue, vice, emotions and the structure of human action in anything like a synoptic or comprehensive way without Christianity. The only comprehensive source of authority that she countenanced, on this view, is God. This interpretation makes sense since Anscombe was a virtue ethicist as well as a devout Roman Catholic.
Yet whatever her own position on the matter may have been, in effect she opened the door to a virtue ethics revival-- a door that many and sundry philosophers have walked through (e.g. the neo-Thomist,Alisdair MacIntyre and Phillipa Foot,whose virtue ethics does not involve the appeal to God or the divine). In sum, by criticizing the predominant paradigms in normative ethics in the English speaking world (Kantian deontology and conseqentialism ), and exploring the possibility of a secular alternative in virtue ethics, Anscombe contributed mightily to contemporary ethics. She also contributed mightily to Wittgenstein-studies, theories of intention and action, philosophical psychology and Catholic ethics. Though this post is confined to her impact on contemporary ethics, her other work is also well worth exploring.
Below is a good and very short (6 minute) video summary of the essay under discussion here, i.e. Anscombe's Modern Moral Philosophy:
Possible Questions/Issues:
Is objective morality possible without appeal to a higher authority such as God?
Do you think we need universally applicable standards in order to be moral agents?
Would you murder one person with your own hands in order to (hopefully) stop a psycho-killer from murdering 5 people? Explain your reasons either way.
Recommended Readings:
Human Life, Action and Ethics: Essays by G.E.M Anscombe, ed. Mary Geach and Luke Gormally; Imprint Academia, 2005
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online): entry on Anscombe here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anscombe/
Modern Moral Philosophy (G.E.M. Anscombe): https://philosophy.uncc.edu/
Encyclopedia of Concise Concepts by Women Philosophers: (entry on Anscombe's philosophy of intention can be found here: https://historyofwomenphilosophers.org/ecc/#hwps
Summary of Phillipa Foot's version of Virtue Ethics Foot was a colleague of Anscombe's at Oxford in the 50s. She developed an influential secular virtue ethics (unlike Anscombe she was an atheist).
https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/ngier/103/VE103.htm
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