This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
Elizabeth Anscombe, QLI, p. 118. My abbreviations of Anscombe’s titles will follow Roger Teichmann, The Philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. ix–x: QLI—“On the Question of Linguistic Idealism;” RRP—“Rules, Rights and Promises;” SAS—“On the Source of the Authority of the State;” RP—“The Reality of the Past;” PJ—“On Promising and its Justice and Whether it Need be Respected in foro interno;” BF—“On Brute Facts.” All page references are to Anscombe’s Collected Papers (all volumes by Blackwell, Oxford 1981).
QLI, p. 120.
RRP, p. 98, emphasis original.
See RRP, p. 99.
RRP, p. 99.
RRP, p. 99, emphases original.
See David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: Being An Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects. Ed. by Lewis A. Selby-Bigge. 2nd, rev. edition by Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), Sections 3.2.1 and 3.2.5.
Rachel Cohon, “Hume’s Moral Philosophy,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Edward N. Zalta. (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume-moral/, edition 2010), Sect. 10.1.
RRP, pp. 99–100, emphases original.
RRP, p. 100.
RRP, p. 98, emphases original.
Some of Anscombe’s own descriptions of Hume’s first problem are rather misleading. Passages like the one just cited, where she asks “how there can be a sign with that signification,” might suggest that (1) the problem concerns the signal by which we promise, not the very concept ‘promise’ itself, or that (2) the problem does not concern the concept, but how such a concept can have evolved.
Anscombe does not discuss this suggestion.
See Thomas Scanlon, “Promises and Practices,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 19, No. 3 (1990), p. 208.
See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. Revised Edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999), Sect. 52, § 10.
See Scanlon, op. cit., p. 210.
QLI, p. 120, emphases added.
RRP, p. 102.
A very wide notion of a rule could include entities for which the above claim is not true. It could, for instance, include instrumental rules, such as “In order for eggs to become soft, you must cook them for three minutes.” Those so-called rules, however, actually formulate causal relations.
See SAS, p. 140.
See RRP, p. 101.
RRP, p. 101.
Teichmann, op. cit., p. 97, introduces a third term, “permitting modal,” for the negation of a stopping modal. (“May,” for instances, could be defined as the negation of “can’t”.)
Hume, Treatise, Sect. 3.2.5, § 2.
See RRP, p. 100.
RRP, p. 100.
RRP, p. 101, emphases original.
RRP, p. 102.
RRP, p. 102, emphasis added.
SAS, p. 142.
Hume, Treatise, Section 3.2.5, § 6.
RRP, p. 100.
See, e.g., Scanlon, op. cit., or Abraham I. Melden, Rights and Persons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), ch. 2.
SAS, p. 138.
Unless, of course, some non-chess-related fact made that necessary. (Perhaps Juliet needs to stick this piece of wood under the table, to keep that table from wobbling.)
John Rawls, “Two Concepts of Rules,” Philosophical Review, Vol. 64, No. 1 (1955), p. 25, already points out that one cannot “steal a base” outside of baseball. John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969), Sect. 2.5, later called rules like the check-rule “constitutive rules.”
RRP, p. 102, emphases original.
RRP, p. 103.
SAS, p. 138, and RP, p. 116, respectively.
PJ, p. 18, emphasis original.
RRP, p. 101, emphases original.
Michael Thompson, “You and I: Some Puzzles about ‘Mutual Recognition’,” Manuscript (2012), Slides 23–48, suggests that such a proof might be constructed from an epistemological observation of Anscombe’s in “On Promising…” (p. 10): I promise only if I understand myself to be promising. Hence, any complete definition of ‘promise’ would have to mention this self-understanding. That, however, makes it impossible to define ‘promise’, as well as to specify what a person who promises thinks she is doing. Anscombe, after bringing up this paradox, proceeds to give a description of the practice of promising (PJ, pp. 14–16), and she indeed claims that this description resolves the paradox (PJ, p. 17). It remains unclear, however, how exactly a practice enables us to think thoughts with such a self-referential content. (“On Promising…” is Anscombe’s earliest treatment of Hume’s Circle, and her later papers do not mention the epistemic paradox anymore.)
E.g. in RRP, p. 100. The original is to be found in Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1015a22–23.
Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 15.
PJ, p. 18, emphasis original.
SAS, p. 145.
SAS, p. 144.
Therefore, Anscombe’s view differs fundamentally from the “Aristotelian constructivism” recently proposed by Mark LeBar in The Value of Living Well (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), Ch. 5.
Foot, op. cit., develops a more detailed theory of this standard. See furthermore Peter T. Geach, The Virtues. The Stanton Lectures 1973–74 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), and Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001).
SAS, p. 145, emphasis original.
BF, p. 24, emphasis added.
See SAS, pp. 142 and 145.
See Brad Hooker, Ideal Code, Real World: A Rule-Consequentialist Theory of Morality (New York: Clarendon Press, 2000), pp. 32–33; David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (New York: Clarendon Press, 1986); Kenneth G. Binmore, Natural Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), Ch. 6.
Some of these theories favor egoism, some favor altruism. The consequences that count as relevant vary accordingly: Either they are the consequences that the agent suffers or they are the consequences that the group suffers. If the latter, then the relevant measure is either the aggregate of the consequences for all members of the group or it is the distribution of these consequences.
Hume’s own conclusions from his discovery seem difficult to reconcile. On the one hand, he justifies the individual’s duty to comply with the rules of a practice by the point of that practice, just as rule-consequentialists and contractarians do (see Treatise, Sect. 3.2.2). On the other hand, he realizes that there is no way to convince a “sensible knave,” who “observes the general rule and takes advantage of all the exceptions” (An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, in Lewis A. Selby-Bigge & Peter H. Nidditch, eds., David Hume’s Enquiries. Reprinted from the Posthumous Edition of 1777 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), Sect. 9.2, §§ 9–10).
Michael Thompson, “Practical Generality,” in Life and Action: Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 167.
Thompson, op. cit., p. 209.
Thompson, op. cit., p. 208.
Friedrich Nietzsche would disagree for the human life form, which he describes as “a rope, tied between animal and super-human” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Introduction § 4, my translation).
BF, p. 22.
See Plato, Republic, 331c.
William Vitek, Promising (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), pp. 118–143 and 215–233, provides an overview of these criticisms. The contemporary heirs of practice views are theories that regard compliance with certain moral principles as constitutive of agency, such as Christine M. Korsgaard, Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity. The John Locke Lectures 2002 (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), or David Velleman, The Possibility of Practical Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Criticisms of this kind of constructivism echo the earlier objection of Hume’s sensible knave—such as David Enoch, “Agency, Shmagency: Why Normativity Won’t Come from What Is Constitutive of Action,” Philosophical Review, Vol. 115, No. 2 (2006).
See Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Sections 18 and 52.
Scalon, op. cit., p. 221. See also Niko Kolodny & Jay Wallace (2003): “Promises and Practices Revisited,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 31, No. 2 (2003), p. 122.
Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Sect. 18, § 5.
Ibid., Sect. 52, § 6.
For a detailed treatment of how Anscombe’s own practice view differs from rule-consequentialist, contractarian and contractualist views, please see my manuscript “Practice Views Revisited.”
Brad Hooker, “The Collapse of Virtue Ethics,” Utilitas, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2002).
The critics here rely on what came to be called the “Open Question Argument”—see George E. Moore, Principia Ethica. Revised Edition with the “Preface to the Second Edition” and Other Papers, ed. by Thomas Baldwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 62–69. For a solution to this problem within the non-naturalist realist paradigm, see Russ Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence (Oxford, New York: Clarendon Press, 2005), Part 2.
It is difficult to determine what role Anscombe’s religious commitments play for her conception of human nature. On the one hand, she regards the spiritual aspect as central. Thus, she says in “Contraception and Chastity”: “What people are for is […], like guided missiles, to home in on God, God who is the one truth it is infinitely worth knowing […]” (in Mary Geach & Luke Gormally, eds., Faith in a Hard Ground: Essays on Religion, Philosophy and Ethics (Exeter; Charlottesville, Va.: Imprint Academic, 2008), p. 172). In her work, however, Anscombe explicitly separates papers “written for the general public, for ordinary philosophical meetings or for philosophical journals” from papers that “were composed to express an explicitly Catholic view” and that “assume a certain background of common belief and faith” (“Introduction” to Collected Papers, Vol. III, p. ix). She here seems to follow the Thomist tradition of separating truths that can be recognized through natural reason from truths that have to be revealed. All of Anscombe’s above-discussed papers were written for philosophy audiences.
Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is an example of such an epistemological conception of art. Following Adorno, a true work of art “mimics” empirical objects in such a way as to display their true nature (Ästhetische Theorie, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp-Verlag 1970), see, e.g., pp. 14–16). The epistemic access that artworks provide differs in kind from the access provided by empirical investigations or theoretical analyses, and it cannot be substituted for either (see ibid., pp. 341–70).
Some expressivists, however, oppose relativism and argue that their theory avoids it. Examples are Simon Blackburn, “Quasi-Realism Is No Fictionalism,” in Mark E. Kalderon, ed., Fictionalism in Metaphysics (New York: Clarendon Press, 2005), or Terrence Horgan & Mark Timmons, “Expressivism, Yes! Relativism, No!” in Russ Shafer-Landau, ed., Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Vol. I (New York: Clarendon Press, 2006).
See John Locke, An Essay Concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil Government, Chapters 1–5.
Many contemporary theories attempt to bridge this Lockean gap with a transcendental argument. James Griffin, On Human Rights (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), Ch. 2, for instance, argues that a right is a human right if it is a prerequisite for the possibility of agency.
UNESCO, The Right to Education (<http://www.unesco.org/new/en/education/themes/leading-the-international-agenda/right-to-education/>, retrieved: 2015-04-03).
Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to Ulf Hlobil and Michael Thompson, who both commented on at least a dozen versions of this paper. Without these intense discussions, I would never have been able to put together the many fascinating pieces of Anscombe’s thought. I furthermore profited much from the comments of the editor-in-chief, John Hacker-Wright, and from an anonymous reviewer. I thank Stanford University’s McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society for funding my research during this time.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Nieswandt, K. Anscombe on the Sources of Normativity. J Value Inquiry 51, 141–163 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-016-9562-9
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-016-9562-9