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On Elizabeth Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958), Intention sections 22-27 (1957), and “War and Murder” (1961).
Anscombe thinks that our moral language was developed in a theistic context, and without a law-giver, the idea of a moral law or obligation doesn’t make sense. However, we can debate about what actions display “justice,” whether some action is “harmful,” whether some task was performed “well,” etc. There are lots of evaluative words that have established social contexts and can be used unproblematically, but they can’t be added up into some overall judgement that “This is good! You must do it!” …at least not without a lot of work into figuring out what constitutes human flourishing.
What she writes beyond that depends on her audience: In a Catholic journal, she has no problem doing ethics: Are we ever justified in killing innocents? Or in going to war? For her fellow analytic philosophers, she instead writes about how best to talk about our actions: Given that a particular action in a particular situation can be given innumerable descriptions, how do these all relate to each other? This, however is still relevant to ethics, in that we need to figure out how to talk about the intentions involved in an action in order to assess its morality.
Join Mark, Wes, Dylan, and special guest Philosophy Bro as we discuss how “why” relates to “how,” whether Anscombe has really overcome Hume’s is-ought gap, and coitus reservatus. But first, listen to Bro’s Introduction to Anscombe. Read more about the topic and get the texts.
End song: “Adds Up to Nothing,” a brand new song by Mark Lint.
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Hi guys, listened to this episode recently on a long drive. I enjoyed the discussion around the 22-minute mark concerning the linkage between Anscombe, Wittgentstein and MacIntyre. While the link between Anscombe and Witt. is obvious, I would characterize Witt.’s influence MacIntyre differently, and emphasize Witt’s “If a lion could speak…” in the PI as a precursor to MacIntyre’s thought on incommensurability between traditions*.
Much is made in the podcast about Anscombe’s rejection of modern ethics, and in this the comparison with MacIntyre is apt. Both would suggest that modern notions of “ought” are rooted in an ethic that could or should be rejected as casually as the moderns rejected an ethic rooted in divine command theory. Both movements tie naturally to discussions about the ultimate grounding of ethics, in divine law for divine command theory and natural law for eighteenth century ethicists. As y’all know, MacIntyre rejects natural law as groundless just as the early moderns rejected divine law: as God’s existence cannot proved, no ground exists for divine law to be rooted; similarly the “self-evident” nature of natural law cannot be proved either since Nietzsche showed us quite clearly there are no self-evident truths. MacIntyre says belief in human rights derived from natural law ought (haha) to be consigned the same status as belief in witches and unicorns.
But the incommensurability issue may in part answer one of Wes’s objections about Anscombe: that her dismissal is sweeping and not well argued. Remember that both Anscombe and MacIntyre are Catholic, and the arguments they make are within their tradition, so some claims can be made which are understood within the tradition and thus brook no dissent. I think Bro even refers to this. For McIntyre, it would be pointless to even have such a discussion outside of the tradition, which forms the thesis of his ‘Whose Justice, Which Rationality?’.
This Catholicism angle clearly makes y’all uncomfortable, both in this episode and in others such as episode 43 on the Existence of God, where Aquinas is treated almost trivially. But Aquinas is crucial as a link between Aristotle and Anscombe / MacIntyre. An understanding of how Aquinas wedded the Aristotelian virtues to Christian virtues is needed specifically to get into the discussion of birth control and Catholic sexual ethics that ends this episode and generally to understand how divine law relates to the virtues (for Aristotle would have considered divine law silly since the unmoved mover is unable to have an interest in human affairs because it contemplates only its own existence).
As regards the difference in using the “rhythm method” and “pulling out,” at the risk of highlighting the inherent risibility in the topic, I would just seek to clarify: the act in question is considered by Catholic doctrine to be twofold — an expression of love and a potency toward procreation. Note that both are required: it is considered equally sinful to have procreative sex without love between partners as it is having loving sex while actively inhibiting the procreative aspect [Or, blocking efficient cause from final cause, as it were]. Using the human faculty of intellect to determine when not to engage in the act is also a form of seeking a final cause, just applied to a different faculty (qua human intellect).
Kind regards,
Randy
* E.g., “If the deontological character of moral judgments is the ghost of conceptions of divine law which are quite alien to the metaphysics of modernity and if the teleological character is similarly the ghost of conceptions of human nature and activity which are equally not at home in the modern world, we should expect the problems of understanding and of assigning an intelligible status to moral judgments both continually to arise and as continually to prove inhospitable to philosophical solutions.” (After Virtue, 111).
Dear PEL:
I can’t help but voice my concern that–once again–the panel seems either unable or unwilling to soberly construe neo-Thomist authors. And of course, the episode on Aquinas was hilariously simplistic, leading this listener to conclude that little if any literature on the other side was consulted (that is to say, not blindly against mid-Scholasticism). Might I recommend Ed Feder’s Scholastic Metaphysics, recently published? I personally would love to see this over-confident bias move to systematic instances of Thomistic thinking.
Cheers.