Abstract
There can be no doubt that in the second half of the twentieth century Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (1919–2001) was one of the towering figures in philosophy – not only in ethics. Two of her numerous works were, and are still, particularly influential: the book on Intention (2), and an essay called “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958: CP III, 26–42 henceforth MMP). However, many important aspects of her contribution to moral philosophy will be found in other papers, some of which were not published until after her death (cf. GG I; GG II). Only if one takes these into account as well, is one able to form an adequate picture of her overall conception of morality. This is not surprising in view of two circumstances. In the work on intention Anscombe deliberately abstains from treating ethical questions. And MMP is largely destructive – and consciously so. What I try to achieve in the following pages is an account of her moral philosophy that pays attention to its scattered components while being focussed on issues relating to its naturalistic orientation.
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Notes
- 1.
MMP argues against three things: (1) moral philosophizing not based on philosophical psychology; (2) the vocabulary of moral “obligation” cut off from belief in a law-giver; (3) the “consequentialist” thesis that any sort of action, however vicious, can be right in extreme conditions (CP III, 26). – One can derive a summary of Anscombe’s positive metaethical principles by negating theses 2–16 from “Twenty Opinions Common among Modern Anglo-American Philosophers” (GG II, 66–68).
- 2.
Ethical virtues are acquired dispositions that we need in order reliably to do what practical wisdom – a disposition of reason – tells us to do. – Like her colleague and friend Philippa Foot, she would not herself have applied the term virtue ethics to her moral philosophy. (The two philosophers were friends and had regular philosophical discussions when colleagues at Somerville College, Oxford, from the late 1940-es onwards until Anscombe succeeded Wittgenstein and von Wright as Professor at Cambridge in 1970.
- 3.
This conception of happiness does, admittedly, agree with Aristotle’s inasmuch as for him the (this-worldly) contemplation of things divine is the primary form of human happiness. – For a discussion of Anscombe’s understanding of man’s final destination cf. B. M. Ashley’s contribution, “What is the End of the Human Person? The Vision of God and Integral Human Fulfilment”, to Gormally (1994), 68–96.
- 4.
Human nature settles, inter alia, what ethical qualities – dispositions of character – are needed in order for human communities to thrive. This is reflected in such notions as good person, good character, or acting well. On the other hand, fortitude, courage, temperance and other primarily “self-regarding” virtues are not integral to an agent’s good character only because others benefit from them as well. – As Anscombe recognizes, the assumption that an individual life cannot go well unless it exhibits “other-regarding” virtues is open to question (cf. Sect. 8.6). – For a critical discussion of the idea that a telos supplied by human nature determines what it is to act well cf. Duncan Richter, “The Conception of the Architectonic Good in Anscombe’s Moral Philosophy” (Gormally et al. 2016, 33–50).
- 5.
These philosophers object to the step from ought to is (which they tend to identify, not quite correctly, with the “naturalistic fallcy” criticized by G. E. Moore). Anscombe does not explicitly defend the possibility of inferring evaluations from “factual” statements. But she implicitly bases it on the teleology involved in the natures of living substances, including human nature. One does not know what man is without grasping (esp. by attending to Aristotelian necessities) how he ought to live (CP III, 38; GG II, 122 f.). Note however, that one might accept this and yet deny that practicalnecessities can be inferred from facts (Sects. 8.4 und 8.6).
- 6.
There are even components of virtuous conduct that, according to Anscombe, are natural – and hence necessary – to us but not on account of any Aristotelian necessity. To this extent her naturalism is a restricted one. Cf. Sect. 8.9 below.
- 7.
For, such a conception cannot be adequate in the first place without already specifying ethical requirements as a central component of human nature. (There is a kind of circularity in the teleological understanding of any organism. It arises from the fact that, roughly speaking, its components serve each other.)
- 8.
For the distinction between the necessity created by a natural telos and the practical necessity here to be discussed cf. CP III, 38. – Concerning Anscombe’s repudiation of a specifically moral ought in MMP (CP III, 29–33; 40 f.) I will here make two remarks. First, it must be seen in the light of her argument against assuming moral obligation by a law not given by a law-giver. Second, in order to explain the practical necessity of doing what one has promised to do, she herself introduces the idea of a special kind of practical ought when she considers stopping and forcing modals. In the bumping game that she describes in CP II, 10–21, one uses locutions such as “You have to Φ” as a conventional way of getting another player to Φ, and “You can’t Φ” as a conventional way of preventing them from Φ-ing. This raises the question whether an ought/ought not of “moral obligation” might be understood on the same lines. Admittedly, both in the bumping game and in the promising practice the use of the (stopping or forcing) modal is backed by appeal to a bump, or promise, respectively, i.e. to a reason that is special in being defined as creating a practical necessity. Nevertheless, why should the practical necessity, e.g., to help that arises from the plight of your neighbour differ, in its moral character, from the necessity to Φ that arises from the promise you have given him to Φ? – My own observations, in the text, on practical necessity should not be taken to apply exclusively to ways of thinking and acting required by virtue.
- 9.
An action can be intended qua X – “under the description ‚X’” – but not qua Y (1957, § 23–26; CP I, 77; CP II, 208–219). This is important for Anscombe’s moral philosophy, esp. for her attitude towards the traditional “doctrine of double effect”. She accepts this doctrine, in her own version, as a principle concerning foreseen but unintended “side-effects” (GG I, 207–226). In this version it says, inter alia: Under certain circumstances it is permissible knowingly (hence voluntarily) to do Y by doing X although it is not permissible to intend Y, if (a) X itself is a good thing to do and more important than omission of Y, (b) one cannot realize X without putting up with Y or worse, (c) one intends X itself but not Y (GG I, 219 f.; cf. 263–265; 274–277; CP III, 66). What Anscombe rejects, by contrast, is the opinion that good intentions can rescue from badness actions that are in themselves bad. Neither conscience nor intention but facts of human nature constitute the primary source of ethical quality. What is always possible is for a bad intention, qua secondary source, to render bad an action that is good in itself (cf. CP III, 64).
- 10.
But cannot the observer be urging or admonishing you by saying: “You ought to...”? – He can; and in this sense a judgement expressed by these words can indeed be non-theoretical. This is interesting in itself. Nevertheless, the observer’s ought-thought is neither “a thought to be enacted by its own thinker” nor a thought to be enacted by you!
- 11.
I say “roughly speaking” because it is after all possible for an observer to attribute to an agent the Aristotelian necessity of the consciousness of practicalnecessity. Thus, an observer can ascribe to me the necessity of a way of acting as something to be recognized and realized by me qua practical necessity. In this respect, also his judgement that I ought to keep promises will differ from his judgement that I ought to have 32 teeth. Nonetheless, both these judgements of his are theoretical ones.
- 12.
A note on ought: the necessities of aims branch out into optionalities of alternative implementation. It may be necessary for you to show NN gratitude but optional to do this by sending flowers. Hence you “ought” to send NN flowers only in an attenuated sense (1957, § 39). Moreover, you may be acting perfectly virtuously whether you choose the flowers for 30$ or for 50$. This is an important point in which Aristotelian types of ethics contradict the utilitarian equation of permissible and mandatory (CP III, 36; GG I, 165; 250 f.).
- 13.
What about the requirements of etiquette? – Well, first, something may be a reason to do such-and-such by the standards of etiquette and also (perhaps only given the cultural context) by the standards of the virtue of politeness, say, or respect. And, second, concerns of wisdom and ethical virtue, such as avoidance of offense, may give you reason to comply with a particular rule of etiquette, i.e. to act on what is a reason by the standard of the rule, though not of morality.
- 14.
MMP expressly rejects as incoherent the Kantian idea of self-legislation, the ascription of moral authority to society, and the assumption of a morally binding (!) contract to establish (!) moral norms (CP III 27; 37 f.).
- 15.
If there is an Aristotelian necessity for you to Φ (where Φ is taken to range over things done with intention) that necessity seems also to require you to be conscious of what I have called (in Sect. 8.4) a “practical necessity” to Φ. Even so, I maintain, we have to keep the two kinds of judgement apart: you can consistently acknowledge that there is an Aristotelian necessity for you to Φ, and refuse to recognize any practical necessity to Φ. No valid inference takes one from the judgement that Aristotelian necessity attaches to the judgement that p to the judgement that p.
- 16.
It could be said that Aristotelian necessity can motivate in this way: My inclinations and intentions are, as every Aristotelian knows, necessarily directed at the good as their object; so if a kind of conduct is such that “without it good cannot be attained” (CP III, 19), its Aristotelian necessity will translate for me into practical necessity. – This argument seems inadequate for four reasons. (1) The Aristotelian necessity of virtue is a mere fact about what is required as a condition of X: even if – or just because! – X is the good at which whatever I do is inevitably directed, consciousness of this fact does not entail consciousness of any practical necessity. (2) The good that cannot come without virtue is not just my own good – which is the one I necessarily intend. The “human well-being” in question is a common good, not just mine. And why should the necessity of my virtue for what is not my good move me? (3) Moreover, it seems that my virtue is not really required for the common good as long as enough others are ready to act well. (4) Finally, what my intentions are necessarily directed at is the formal good: something that I can be said to be aiming at, whether the aim I actually pursue is in fact – “materially” – my good or an illusion of goodness. Hence there is no guarantee that I will equate what I am necessarily after with human well-being. Inevitable orientation towards the formal good cannot make me recognize conduct required by Aristotelian necessity as conduct required by that orientation. – All these considerations, except (3), can be found more or less vaguely insinuated in the somewhat dialectical conclusion of “On Promising and its Justice” (CP III, 19 f.).
- 17.
This subjectivist streak in the article from 1969 seems to have gone unnoticed by commentators. Perhaps it foreshadows the more explicitly subjectivist sort of naturalism that Foot put forward in “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives” (1972) and soon afterwards abandoned. Both Anscombe’s and Foot’s articles seem to anticipate the internalism that Bernard Williams defends much later in “Internal and External Reasons” (originally published in 1979, then in 1981 in his Moral Luck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 101–113). – As Anscombe’s later writings show, she neither developed nor retained the view that the rationality of virtuous conduct is relative to agents’ purposes.
- 18.
In order to assess the force of this objection, we must, inter alia, distinguish the idea of a motivating justification of the general moral orientation of your conduct from the idea of a motivating justification of particular actions you perform in accordance with virtuous patterns of conduct. I’ll return to this distinction at the beginning of Sect. 8.9.
- 19.
The idea of “justifying” and motivating the moral orientation of one’s conduct in terms of an objective X one has embraced suggests the question: Can there be no true and false, or right and wrong, about whether one ought to pursue X in the first place? Anscombe herself, after all, rejects the Humean doctrine that objectives can be determined only by passion (or, as she correctly interprets Hume: will). “It is reasonable to speak of actions at any rate as sometimes being ‘against reason’”; reason can “dictate our aims” (GG II, 118 f.); it proposes “generic ends” (i.e., what I have here called objectives); if it is “right reason” it proposes “a true end”; and “that there is [such an end] can well be argued” (GG II, 119 f.). But what is the criterion of truth and rightness here? Anscombe formulates this directive: “Aim at what human life is for attaining” (GG II, 120). Here the criterion is taken to be supplied by human nature or at any rate by an objective teleology that determines what sort of objective one ought to pursue! – What I have quoted here is of course taken from a later paper (viz. “Sin” (1989), GG II, 117–156). It is in any case clear that the idea that you cannot have a reason to act well unless you have an objective to do so was not Anscombe’s last word on the issue.
- 20.
In German, the word “begründen” would here be appropriate. “Justify” tends, in many contexts, to have a sense of defensiveness about it.
- 21.
Thus, the brief essay “Hume and Julius Caesar” applies Wittgenstein’s observations on certainty to the topic of historical evidence: our belief that a reliable chain of confirmations has reached us in a given case is generally based on the conviction that the past event they ultimately bear witness to has in fact happened, rather than vice versa (CP I, 88 f.). Like the possibility of derivation, confirmation does not necessarily amount to justification. – I have discussed the application of this insight to moral certainties in “Has Moral Education a Rational Basis?” (Gormally 1994, 203–225).
- 22.
This is the traditional doctrine of a natural law that is “promulgated [by the Creator] to every grown man in his knowledge of good and evil” (CP III, 37; cf. GG I, 179).
- 23.
The conception I have sketched in Sect. 8.8 of a quasi-innate sort of moral knowledge allows such a denial. For if the agent does not draw his central moral convictions from a grasp of human nature but rather so to speak finds them in himself as immediate, i.e. underived, certainties, then it is possible for at least some of those convictions to be natural to him although neither they nor their practical implementation are instrumental to requirements of his nature.
- 24.
This is an application of the idea that virtue wants to be practised for its own sake. Cf. also question (1) in Sect. 8.6. on the purity of moral motivation.
- 25.
One example I have not mentioned is the universal conviction of mankind that “a dead body isn’t something to be put out for the collectors of refuse to pick up” (GG II, 187; cf. GG I, 270). – The spiritual aspect of chastity is discussed by Mary Geach in “Anscombe on Sexual Ethics” (Gormally et al. 2016, 227–242). – Is ascription of mystical value to some ways of acting compatible with Anscombe’s ethical realism? This realism contests the “autonomy” of morality (cf. Sect. 8.3); for it implies that moral judgements have to invoke premoral criteria. Can this also be said of judgements relating to ways of acting whose value is mystical – judgements, therefore, whose truth does not rest on any Aristotelian necessity? Anscombe does not answer, or even raise, this question. But her recognition of mystical value makes it particularly problematic to take her naturalistic understanding of morality for an attempt to justify moral conduct.
- 26.
According to an early paper, “the spirituality of the human soul is its capacity to get a conception of the eternal, and to be concerned with the eternal as an objective” (“The Immortality of the Soul”, GG II, 69–83, here 74). Here she also says: “Human beings are in for a final orientation towards or away from the good” (GG II, 83). Perhaps the core of man’s spiritual nature is orientation towards truth, including practical truth, hence goodness (GG II, 265). Cf. also GG I, 3–16; 21–24; 68–73; 269–270; GG II, 197 f. as well as a paper of mine, “The Spiritual Nature of Man”, in Gormally et al. 2016, 10–32.
- 27.
So much for a brief and inevitably selective bibliography. The number of publications on Anscombe’s moral philosophy is already beyond counting.
References
Works by Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe:
(1957) Intention. Oxford.
CP I (1981) From Parmenides to Wittgenstein. Collected Philosophical Papers, Volume I. Minneapolis.
CP II (1981) Metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. Collected Philosophical Papers, Volume II. Minneapolis.
CP III (1981) Ethics, religion and politics. Collected Philosophical Papers, Volume III. Minneapolis.
GG I (2005) Human life, action and ethics. Essays (Geach, M., Gormally, L., eds.). Charlottesville.
GG II (2008) Faith in a hard ground. Essays on religion, philosophy and ethics (Geach, M., & Gormally, L., eds.). Charlottesville.
Other works:
Anscombe’s moral philosophy is strongly influenced by relevant works of Aristotle and by the second book of Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae. However, like the rest of her philosophy, her ethical thinking also shows her to be a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Two of his works, in particular, should be mentioned here:
Philosophical Investigations (4th ed. 2009). Oxford.
Über Gewißheit/On Certainty (1969). Oxford.
For many of the topics treated in the present article more extended discussions can be found in the following collections:
Gormally, Luke (ed.). (1994). Moral truth and moral tradition. Essays in Honour of Peter Geach and Elizabeth Anscombe. Blackrock.
O’Hear, A. (Ed.). (2004). Modern moral philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gormally, L., Jones, D. A., & Teichmann, R. (Eds.). (2016). The moral philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe. Charlottesville.
For introductions to Anscombe’s ethical thinking in general, I recommend the following three books:
Teichmann, R. (2008). The philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Richter, D. (2011). Anscombe’s moral philosophy. Maryland.
Diamond, C. (2019). Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, going on to ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
A subjectivist version of ethical naturalism has been put forward, and later rejected, by Foot:
Foot, P. R. (1972). Morality as a system of hypothetical imperatives. The Philosophical Review, 305–316.
Foot, P. R. (2001). Natural goodness. Oxford: Clarendon.
The following work develops a teleological view of the nature of (human) life. It builds on Anscombe and has greatly influenced various version of ethical naturalism:
Thompson, M. (1995). The representation of life. In R. Hursthouse, G. Lawrence, & W. Quinn (Eds.), Virtues and reasons. Philippa Foot and moral theory (pp. 247–296). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Müller, A.W. (2020). Practical Reason as Human Nature: G. E. M. Anscombe’s Moral Philosophy. In: Hähnel, M. (eds) Aristotelian Naturalism. Historical-Analytical Studies on Nature, Mind and Action, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37576-8_8
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