Episode 88: G.E.M. Anscombe: Should We Use Moral Language?

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 88 is something like, how should we talk about what we do? We read G.E.M. Anscombe's essay Modern Moral Philosophy from 1958, also sections 22 through 27 of her book Intention from 1957 and her essay War and Murder from 1961. You can join the discussion, get the texts and lots More information@PartiallyExaminedLife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer speaking to you from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:42 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:45 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:47 Philosophy: This is Philosophy bro, speaking from somewhere totally awesome. You wish you were here. Don't worry about where.

0:53 Wes: Undisclosed location.

0:55 Dylan: Welcome back.

0:57 Philosophy: It's good to be back, guys. It's been a while, but I'm really glad you're having me back on.

1:00 Dylan: Awesome Precog, man. That was great.

1:03 Philosophy: Thanks. I'm really glad that worked out.

1:05 Mark: Yes, I've noticed the Precogs, we kindly record these 10 minute or so summaries weeks beforehand so that you folks can listen to them and prepare. And it will make up for the fact that we always just ramble around and say nonsense. And you can actually hear one person uninterrupted say something, but yet the other. They only get half the number of downloads that the regular episodes do. So come on.

1:26 Philosophy: Yeah, that's the guarantee that someone has done the reading. Like, that's the person you know is not just showing up to class and bullshitting their way through

1:36 Mark: ground rules for our discussion, which we feel we have to explain when we have a guest

1:41 Wes: who is a little slow.

1:44 Philosophy: That's me. Real slow. Real slow.

1:46 Mark: Guest number one, try. Try not to assume that our audience has read what we're talking about or has any other background in philosophy. Although we can't assume they've listened to the freaking Precog. We recorded it. Come on.

1:59 Philosophy: I feel like that's on the listener now.

2:01 Wes: It's good that we've shifted that it's only 10 minutes.

2:03 Mark: 10 minutes of your life you'll never get back.

2:07 Wes: Yes.

2:08 Mark: Actually, you could listen to it at triple speed and then it'll be three and a half.

2:12 Wes: Right? Right. Before you listen to this two hour marathon at half speed.

2:18 Mark: See, the problem is before people listen to the full episode and they know it's going to be an hour and a half, two hours, then they like drop acid or something. But if you do that right before the 10 minutes.

2:27 Wes: Then, no, they're in their car and they're out commuting somewhere or something. Maybe 10 minutes is just not enough. Maybe that's it.

2:32 Mark: That's probably it. Or they drop acid while in the car. I don't know.

2:36 Dylan: Should we try to get to be like the house radio at new pot dens in Colorado and Washington?

2:43 Mark: Because you could just pick up anywhere in the middle of any episode and just groove on it. That's exactly right.

Right.

2:50 Philosophy: I'll bet you could do a super cut that really gets the acid fiends going. I backed myself into a corner.

2:57 Mark: We should get our show played in super cuts. Is that what you're suggesting? That's a great idea.

3:01 Philosophy: That's what I'm saying. Take the very best of Wes and there's your title. That one's free. And just play that in the coffee houses.

3:09 Wes: That's right.

3:10 Mark: Rule number two, don't make arguments that hinge on something other than what we've agreed to read. Don't say you would know what I was talking about. If only you'd read the treatise by R.M. Hare that Anscombe's complaining about, which was called, I believe, doing what you wanna and feeling groovy.

3:26 Philosophy: That sounds right. I can confirm that.

3:28 Wes: Yes.

3:28 Mark: Number three. We will be rigorous and exact in all that we say, unless doing otherwise would be potentially more amusing. All right, all right, all right. So we got three essays here, one of which is not an essay, it's a whole. It's right in the middle of a book, which I just read all of. So.

3:43 Philosophy: Ha.

3:43 Mark: Because it's a very skinny little book. I felt I bought it. I should read it all the way through. So I did. And there's actually some good stuff later, but I won't talk about that.

3:51 Philosophy: What did we just say, Mark, about readings that are outside the reading?

3:55 Dylan: He's just showing off.

3:56 Mark: Don't make arguments that hinge on something. You could just make random comments that hinge.

4:00 Wes: Mark just violates this rule all over the place.

4:04 Mark: It was Taylor's usually.

4:06 Wes: Yeah.

4:07 Mark: Under duress.

4:08 Wes: It was redone. We had to redo it to try and reign him in. But it doesn't work.

4:13 Mark: It used to start. Mark, don't make arguments that hint. But I edited that part out.

4:19 Philosophy: Executive decision.

4:21 Mark: All right, well, what are our opening impressions? I know, Wes, you were none too pleased with this one. Do you want to not start on a downer?

4:29 Wes: She's such a pleasant character, right? She has such a pleasant bedside manner. It's Hard not to love her just at first. Hume is a sophist.

4:41 Philosophy: Yeah, right. She's bold and just like, yeah, Hume, he was clever, but a sophist. Let me be clear. Hume was a sophist. Mill's dumb. Kant had a ridiculous idea.

4:51 Wes: She makes some very bold claims, but she doesn't spell out her arguments in detail. It requires me to do a lot of work essentially, to try and get at what's going on, because my first thought is, well, that's a mischaracterization of Kant. Is there some basis for that that I haven't? You know, and then I get into secondary literature and I find out, yeah, it's not a good criticism of Kant that she. Which is not to say I don't. I'm not sympathetic to virtue ethics or to the underlying issues raised, but the. My general. I wasn't happy to read this one.

5:26 Mark: So this comment seems specifically about the modern moral philosophy paper, which I guess was super famous at the time, as these things go, right, Bro, look at the tone.

5:36 Philosophy: How could that not be famous? That was a pretty big deal and it was certainly influential. She has lectures that sort of repeat these themes in lots of different places. So maybe part of the reason she's being hasty is that she's done this work other places. But even so, like, this paper was a pretty important paper that she wrote.

5:54 Mark: Yeah, I don't know that there's a more systematic take elsewhere. She repeats some of these same things. So this is after intention. So some of these points are repeated almost verbatim in intention, a little after the part that we read. And she doesn't seem to refine them a lot. You can kind of see in the Intention book the way that she does philosophy, which is sort of like Wittgenstein. Right. She was a student of Wittgenstein. She was his pal. She was like, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, one of the only. Like, he generally didn't like women philosophers, but really took a shine to her and called her, what, old boy or something?

6:29 Philosophy: It was something like that. But, yeah, they were really close. When she left Cambridge, she, like, commuted every weekend to see him and then was there at his deathbed and was one of the executors of his will. So they were super close.

6:42 Mark: Right. And she translated the Philosophical Investigations, which steady listeners will know. That's the last time that Philosophy bro appeared on the program with us was two episodes on that. So you can certainly see, especially in the Intention book, his influence, where she'll just bring up random Wittgenstein quotes, because she's got them right all there on the back of her hand.

7:01 Dylan: One thing I liked about is that she's a little more systematic and presenting an argument. I read some quote in, maybe it was a Stanford encyclopedia, that she had said that studying with Wittgenstein saved her from becoming a phenomenologist.

7:14 Mark: Actually, I think it was a phenomenalist.

7:16 Dylan: A phenomenalist. Okay.

7:17 Mark: Well, I wasn't sure who that. Like, which figure that was associated with meaning.

7:21 Wes: Resting things on interstates.

7:23 Mark: Yes.

7:24 Dylan: Yeah. But I mean, at least in the sections that we read, there's that sort of real world, ordinary language kind of approach that makes me think of phenomenology. Not like the way Husserl did it, but.

7:37 Mark: Well, like the way. I mean, this was a big strain in analytic philosophy, thanks to the later Wittgenstein, but then also people like JL Austin and then Ryle. Yeah, Ryle. So that's why I thought the question was, how should we talk about what we do? Because it's not really about what is ethics or what should we do. The one essay, Modern Moral Philosophy, you could interpret as, can we do ethics at all? Could be something like that, but the intention is not about that. And War and Murder is an actual Catholic ethics essay. It's very straightforwardly. It doesn't reject the possibility of ethics whatsoever.

8:09 Philosophy: Yeah. So this isn't like Wittgenstein moved over from metaphysics to ethics, where it's just like. Well, talking about it is strange. A lot of our arguments hinge on like, hey, guys, the words that we're using. Do we know what those words mean anymore? Because it turns out so in modern moral philosophy, the word ought doesn't have the force that we think it has. So she's certainly getting behind language in a way that shows Wittgenstein's influence. But she's not just trying to boil away ethics in language the way that maybe Wittgenstein was trying to dissolve metaphysics and ethics. She's making substantive ethical claims.

8:42 Wes: Yeah. The closest she comes to that is saying that the word ought, it turns out, is actually meaningless. I love the way the argument pivots from a rejection of the ought is distinction, definitely. Oh, yeah. Well, in fact, that distinction does hold, but that's only because ought is meaningless. So that kind of dissolution of a philosophical problem by claiming something is meaningless is a common thing with ordinary language philosophy. Right. You start out with a conceptual analysis and you want to deflate a problem by showing it's a problem of language.

9:14 Dylan: Maybe you Guys could clear this up for me. Because I thought she wanted to purge aught of the morally ought to and resurrect, or at least preserve an understanding of ought that has to do with flourishing. And even in that, she openly admits that carefully characterizing what you mean by flourishing is going to be tough too. But she wants to have that be the place where ought rests and purge it of the implicit adjective.

9:39 Wes: Well, she calls those ordinary oughts. Those are not oughts that we normally think of as having moral force, right? Prudential. So if I want to lose weight, I ought to eat, right?

9:50 Dylan: But the odd of justice and injustice, I thought was a ought regarding flourishing that was not associated with a moral ought. She wanted to remove the moral part of it, right?

10:00 Philosophy: And she thinks that that flourishing is like losing weight. That there's an objective fact as to what constitutes flourishing for us. And once we get to that, then it's just like ought with respect to losing weight. Or oh, if you like that, you know, what you ought to try is you should try this other beer that they make or whatever. It's the same ought for her because of the objective facts of our flourishing.

10:22 Dylan: The way I was thinking of it is that there are these kinds of oughts and needs that really form a kind of causal chain. Thinking about the guy with the pump who's poisoning the Nazis. In the intention essay, one characteristic of the answers to why is the water going into the houses? Is because I'm moving my arm up and down and moving the pump. And there's a kind of causality that we're used to talking about. But then there ends up being a gap. Page 13, about 2/3 of the way through. In the modern moral philosophy essay, the circumstances can clearly make a great deal of difference.

In estimating the justice or injustice of procedures. She wants to characterize the judgment that you make as according to what's reasonable. So that's sort of virtue ethics thing, that is that such and such a delay of payment of such and such a debt to a person so circumstanced on the part of a person who so circumstanced would or would not be unjust is really only to be decided according to what's reasonable. And for this there can be in principle, no canon other than giving a few examples. That is to say, while it is because of a big gap in philosophy that we can give no general account of the concept of virtue and of the concept of justice, but have to proceed using the concepts only by giving examples, still there is an area where it is not because of any gap.

But it is in principle, the case that there is no account except by way of examples. And this is where the canon is what's reasonable, which is, of course, not a canon. So what I take her to mean by that is that you have this kind of causal account of oughts. But then you jump into the problem of, well, the reason that I'm activating the pump is to kill the Nazis. That requires a different kind of answer to the question of why and a different kind of ought. And I thought that she was leaving that up to a kind of judgment, almost like a value thing, maybe.

In other stuff she writes, she says that judgment is somehow like other questions of fact. But I didn't see that she seemed to be emphasizing exactly the opposite here.

12:14 Philosophy: You mean when she's emphasizing the opposite at the part where she talks about how, like, you have to make a judgment, and there we're talking about what's reasonable.

12:20 Dylan: Yeah. So she seemed to divide these things into two sorts. Roughly speaking, a kind of causal chain of oughts. The kind of thing that you say, well, you ought to fill the car up with gas if you want to drive it. And then there is a whole different category of oughts. And so if we just stick with the example in the intention book of the plumber pumping the water into the house, there's a whole chain of what I characterize as causal oughts. But then you have a gap that you can't explain except by having a judgment of value.

12:51 Philosophy: Right. So the way that gets causal, I think, would be something like whether the gardener should pump the water is a judgment that he's going to have to make based on what's reasonable, but it's the making of that judgment and following through on it that contributes to his flourishing. So in the same way that filling up your car is what you ought to do if you want to go on a road trip, you have to pay attention to the circumstances and make a considered judgment about what's just or unjust. And then you have to follow through on what you think is just, and that's what contributes to flourishing.

13:23 Wes: So I think, Dylan, maybe what you mean by causal oughts is what philosophers often call hypothetical imperatives. Right. So if you have some desire, interest, or goal, you can often find out what you ought to do in order to achieve that goal. And so the way that relates to what philosophy bro is saying about flourishing

13:40 Philosophy: is that philosophy bro is my dad just call me bro.

13:45 Mark: How about Peabro Jr. Yo, yo, yo, Peabro.

13:48 Philosophy: He's actually also that's not my dad. That would be weird. Like being a dad and being called that. That wouldn't be, Come on, Daddy.

13:55 Mark: Don't call me Daddy.

Call me.

13:57 Philosophy: Don't call me dad. Not out in public.

13:59 Wes: So, ultimately, we want the hypothetical chain to come to an end, right? We want some ultimate ground that's universal for all human beings. Because when we make these moral judgments, we are saying that all human beings are bound by them. Not that I want to lose weight, so I'm going to do this, but you can do what you want, or, oh, you're a psychopath who likes killing little girls. Okay, well, then you ought to go out and get a knife and blah, blah, blah. No. So the hypotheticals don't work in that sense. So you have to chain it to something like human nature or human reason, or in the case of virtue ethics, a telos or flourishing to happiness, a kind of end that's implicit in our nature and that we all share qua human beings.

I'm sympathetic to that project, but there are lots of formidable goals to it. It's not like Kant and other philosophers weren't aware of that project. Obviously, it's been around since Aristotle. First of all, it's an egoistic explanation for morality, Right. Ultimately, I'm trying to say why some particular act is wrong or right. I appeal to my own interest. I appeal to my own flourishing, or to the flourishing of the species or to human beings in general. But it's easy to come up with examples where you can say, well, look, in one particular instance, someone can talk themselves out of that.

Someone can say, I'm not going to cease to be a happy person because of one instance of doing something wrong. So in this particular case, yes, I am going to kill this bastard texting in front of me at the movie theater or something like that. So I think this idea of grounding morality and human flourishing is interesting, but it's fraught with problems. So I think it's an interesting suggestion that she makes towards the end of this essay. Right. She doesn't explain how it's possible, and I think she admits that a lot more work would have to be done to show how that kind of grounding is possible.

15:38 Mark: Well, so again, from the Stanford Encyclopedia Philosophy article on this essay, it says, well, you could give it two interpretations. One is the interpretation that we've been giving so far and that Bro gave in the Precog, which is she's arguing that there's something conceptually wrong about the way modern moral philosophy has been Done. So therefore we should go back and do something like Aristotelian virtue ethics. But as you say at the end, he says, gosh, but we're not really in any position to do that. We have to do a lot of work to figure out moral psychology before we could start that.

And so a lot of people took this essay as a challenge to do exactly that kind of thing. And Bro's Precog was analyzing intention, although that book again was right before this article, not afterward, as a way of starting that account of. Let's just give a really thorough analysis of what it is for an act to be intentional and how that's different from an involuntary. Involuntary and other things like that. It's a pretty thorough analysis. However, a completely different take on this modern moral philosophy essay is that it's just designed to show actually that we need to go back to something like

16:40 Wes: divine command theory, by which we mean morality must stem from the commandments of a God. Right?

16:46 Mark: Right.

16:46 Wes: She thinks that our moral language is kind of a legacy of that and that once we've gotten rid of God, it doesn't make sense to use that language. Although it's actually the Divine command theory that's problematic. Right. You face the euthyphro problem when you start to think about it. Morality ceases to make sense when it becomes just an external imposition that you obey simply in order to avoid punishment.

17:10 Philosophy: Wes, are you saying that morality is tricky?

17:14 Wes: Yeah, but what I'm saying is, I'm just pointing to. Readers should be aware when they read this essay that it's a very radical thing to say, oh well, we should be returning to divine command theory, when that was sort of the first thing that moral theorists do is jettison that, because it doesn't make any sense. So you have someone like Kant who recognizes that in the same way that it doesn't make sense to say it. In the epistemological level, objectivity involves comparing a representation to some completely mind independent entity, the thing in itself.

In the same way, morality can involve our relationship to completely external command from a God, because then it ceases to be morality. It just simply becomes obedience based on fear. And so Kant wants to say, well, actually we must be self legislating both epistemologically and morally. Epistemologically we construct and then objectivity falls out of our analysis of what we've constructed. And morally we self legislate because of our reasonable natures. This is something that Anscombe finds absurd because she thinks that following the law necessarily involves doing it out of fear.

I don't think that's the way laws work. That doesn't even work that way in a system of actual laws in a country. It's not that I'm walking around thinking I'd love to murder someone right now, but the law says I can't. And my relationship to the law is simply one of fear of punishment. And it's because in many cases I actually believe the law is right. I believe the law is good. I respect the law, to use Kant's terms. So that notion of respect shows you that the notion of being a self legislator in the sense of having reasons that one respects, makes complete sense.

In the same way that you would be bound by 2, 2, 4 as a kind of calculation, I'm bound by reason in some sense. Once I go through these steps. There's nothing incoherent about that. So that's one other immediate objection I had. And I know I'm breaking my own rule of jumping in with objections. We actually really explicate the text, but I think in this case, for me it's telling to try and get at what she's saying.

19:08 Mark: I have a quote. Maybe we should actually read a little bit of her historical account, which is a page or so in the terms should or ought or needs relate to good and bad. For instance, machinery needs oil, or should or ought to be oiled, in that running without oil is bad, for it runs badly without oil. So he's giving examples of where should and ought are not used in a special moral sense. The ordinary and quite indispensable term should, needs, ought, must acquired a special sense by being equated in the relevant context with is obliged or is bound or is required to, in the sense which one can be obliged or bound by a law.

Or something can be required by law. How did this come about? The answer is in history. Between Aristotle and us came Christianity with its law conception of ethics. For Christianity derived its ethical notions from the Torah. In consequence of this dominance of Christianity for many centuries, the concepts of being bound, permitted or excused became deeply embedded in our language and thought. The Greek word hamartanein talks about the Greek and Latin words that even though they initially meant something like mistake or missing the mark, came to be translated to correspond roughly to the word sin.

And she gives other examples. To have a law conception of ethics is to hold that what is needed for conformity with the virtues, failure in which is the mark of being bad qua man, failure to keep with the

20:23 Philosophy: virtues is what makes you bad at being A man.

20:26 Mark: Right. That's required by divine law. Naturally, it's not possible to have such a conception unless you believe in God as a lawgiver.

20:32 Philosophy: Can we go back to the two readings as like a modus ponens or modus tollens is I think the phrasing the SEP uses. So she's arguing something like, we can't have a law conception without a divine lawgiver. If we're going to abandon that, then we should go in this other direction. What has turned into virtue ethics? One reading is. And so let's go in the direction of virtue ethics. The other direction is. But we can't go in that direction, virtue ethics. We just. It would be way, way too much work. So all that's left is the divine law theory.

21:02 Wes: And there's a third reading which is that those two could work together in some way. SEP doesn't mention that. But there are virtue ethicists, I think, who are also Christians. Right. And so.

21:11 Philosophy: Well, yeah, Alastair MacIntyre stands out as one.

21:14 Mark: Right. Bro pitched this topic to us originally as, oh, she's the link between Wittgenstein and MacIntyre. Like, oh, that's kind of interesting. Those two don't seem to have a lot in common. But yeah, okay.

21:23 Wes: Yeah.

21:24 Philosophy: And the link is this rejection of is ought distinction. That ought has lost its force. We've uprooted it in this particular way. It's getting used in a context divorced from where it originally got its meaning. And so if we get behind it in the way that Wittgenstein would want us to, it sort of falls apart. And then MacIntyre is like the big backer of virtue ethics or the big name in sort of reinvigorating virtue ethics. So he took up Anscombe's banner after that. But he also does a lot. He spends a lot more time. You guys did After Virtue, so you've seen the chapters where he just spends like chapters and chapters on like.

And then Hume tried. Here's where he fucking got it wrong. And then Kant tried and boy, was that a mess. And then Mill tried. And look at how he's using these words like pleasure. What a joke. He does the language analysis much more in depth. And I think that's where the link is.

22:12 Wes: Right.

22:13 Mark: Well, and the Wittgenstein part here to me is that in talking about these non moral or premoral uses of should needs ought to. To me it's kind of like she's talking about language games that she's saying Within a particular context, of course, we know what ought means, that if you're playing a game of chess, you ought not to move the bishop in certain ways. There's rules. That means you can only do it in certain ways. And when you're dealing with an organism, you're Aristotle and you're analyzing what makes an organism grow and flourish. Then you talk about, you know, it ought to have this much water and this much sunlight and that kind of stuff, and all that stuff makes sense from its context.

And it's only when we abstract from those individual contexts and say, oh, no, there must be some overpowering ought. Right? The way you were putting it, the chain of oughts, you know, well, why do we want it to flourish? Well, because it's the good of everything to flourish. I know. Well, why is that? You know, that there needs to be some absolute ought that overarches all of them. And that's what ethics is, is about figuring that out. So that as far as human action goes, maybe we have to come down to the principle of utility or Kant's formulation or something, that Anscombe seems to think that all these abstractions to come up with moral rules of that sort really falsify the individual cases that they're pulled from.

I think she wants to say that we can continue to do ethics, and we do it all the time. You know, the first example she gives of why Hume's conviction that you can't go from is to ought is ridiculous is surely we can go from, I've paid you for something and you've delivered it to me, and we live in a society where currency is expected for that. That leads me to I owe you some money.

23:50 Philosophy: That's where language games really seem to come up, is the institutions in which brute facts for her occur.

23:57 Dylan: Going back to Mark's bishop example, you would have the distinction between the bishop that's on the dark squares moves on diagonally on the dark squares. So you would have one kind of ought. That bishop ought move to the black squares, but ought not move on any of the white squares. But then you also have a different kind of ought, which is the bishop ought to move to square X, because then you will win the game because you have now put the opponent in checkmate, that kind of thing. And to me, she was particularly useful in trying to think through and articulate those two different kinds of oughts.

24:33 Philosophy: I think that first kind of ought that sort of breaks down in the context of the game, because you ought not move your bishop that way, because it's the rules of the game. But we can bring those under the same heading, which is like, if you want to play chess really well, first you have to play by the rules and then also hear some other things going on. I'm not sure how those separate out. Like, I see what you're getting at. That one is establishing even the rules of the game and the other is establishing, like, within those rules, how do we flourish the best?

25:02 Wes: Well, it's like positive versus negative obligations. Right. Or duties. Right. Thou shalt not kill.

25:07 Mark: Thou shalt not move.

25:09 Wes: The bishop, usually the bishop on only the white squares. And there's the positive side of things. Thou shalt be an excellent dude. And that is the checkmate side of things. So the distinction Dylan's making is a typical. It's something like positive and negative obligations or virtues.

25:25 Philosophy: I'm just worried about the analogy breaking down at the point where when you're making an illegal chess move that's more analogous to you shall not fly without the aid of a machine. Oh, that wasn't going to be a concern. Don't worry. I'm not sure that's not the relevant ought going on because we get to. Are you failing to flourish at chess or are you not even playing chess when you make an illegal move?

25:48 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point.

25:49 Mark: Well, think about the situation with I owe you money. You know, there are different reasons why I might not pay you appropriately. Maybe I don't have the right kind of currency. Maybe there's something about it that I don't understand. You know, if you send your 6 year old up to buy something and they don't quite get what they're supposed to do, I also might actually just be trying to cheat you. Or maybe I went home and I counterfeited some money. There are lots of ways you could do a taxonomy of the different ways of screwing up and say some of them are blameworthy and some of them are not. Some of them just, you know, I have to explain to you what the rules are. But the most important distinction is just, are you doing it right or not? Right. Am I paying you or not? And then apart from that, if I don't pay you correctly, then we can talk about what the reasons for that might be.

26:32 Philosophy: The most important distinction for what? For deciding the ethics of that situation.

26:36 Mark: No, we're not even talking about ethics. We're deciding does the situation go well. Right. We're in an interaction that has certain social rules and if I don't fulfill my end of that, that's the Most important thing, she brings up Aristotle, I think for the first time in saying, look, Aristotle doesn't have this overarching moral ought. He has all these individual situational oughts. And you can tell that by looking at how he analyzes this breakdown between sort of intellectual and what is sometimes, I guess, translated as moral virtues. We seem to have a strong sentiment that if you don't understand something, then you're not blameworthy.

Right? If you're just stupid, then that's different than being malicious. But Aristotle really had, you know, to be morally upright, you have to be wise, you have to understand things. So there actually are intellectual virtues that according to our lights, have moral components. There are actual failings that we might just call intellectual failings that he would call moral failings. And yes, you can approach this whole thing with a modern spirit and say, well, we can analyze those into their moral components and non moral components. But she's trying to say maybe we shouldn't do that.

That that's the wrong move that's been going on here all along is that you only run into this problem of making the jump from is to ought. If you just by saying these are in different logical categories, you slice them in the first place. And if you don't do that, and she says we don't actually do that in ordinary language, in our ordinary use of these things, then you don't have this problem.

28:03 Wes: First of all, she doesn't give any examples of going from is to a moral ought. She gives examples of going to non moral oughts, which just means she's setting up hypothetical imperatives. It's not an innovation to say if you want to flourish or if this or if that, then you ought to do this. That's not a challenge to Hume. And she understands that, which is why she basically says moral language as we use it is meaningless. So that's an interesting position. But the Aristotelian alternative is not what most ethicists would consider even rising to the level of moral language.

Again, they would consider these things hypothetical imperatives about what you do to reach your goals or your desires. And that's the problem. So if you think that moral language as we typically use is bullshit and there is no such thing as morality as ethicists typically think of it, I think that's fine. But there's something you have to keep in mind. You're not saving that typical conception of

28:53 Dylan: morality, then that's her whole point. Like that's one of her theses, right? Is that modern moral philosophy is bullshit for exactly the reasons you just said, Wes.

29:02 Mark: Right.

29:03 Wes: I don't think she argues convincingly that it's bullshit.

29:05 Dylan: Oh, I'm not saying that she argues convincingly. I'm saying that's one of her claims. I mean, that's a different question.

29:10 Philosophy: She's on board with you, Wes. Right.

29:12 Wes: But I'm just making sure we understand that this idea that we've bridged the ought is distinction. We haven't really, because we've limited our horizons with the word ought. And then, yes, once you redefine ought in this very anodyne way, then yes, you can say you've bridged the ought is distinction. But you've just denied one of Hume's fundamental premises, which is that moral language in the strong sense is meaningful.

29:34 Philosophy: Sort of stepping back historically, she's rejecting starting from Butler forward and that she doesn't have all the work, that she doesn't have everything to show. She might respond with, well, the tradition that Hume and Butler and Mill all the way up to GE Moore, the tradition they find themselves in, they had 200 years of getting it wrong. So, yeah, you're right. I don't have everything that you need. And maybe it seems like all you've really said is you've brought is and ought together in the sense that you said ought is like a fact of the matter. Hooray. But will you give me 50 years, Wes? Will you give me 50 years to develop something new?

30:10 Wes: Only if you're nicer. Only if you're nicer will I give you 50 years.

30:13 Mark: I think we need to look at how she treats justice here. You brought that up earlier, Dylan, because the examples that she gives are not just ones of if you want to do this, you should, blah, blah, blah. Because she talks about justice. Dylan, did you have something about that?

30:27 Dylan: That is the central example that she wants to give of something that seems like it's ethical, and we often treat it as ethical, that she wants to reclaim as having the issue of moral ought, but that you could have an ought in terms of just and unjust, that has a genuine force to it. I'll just take you guys for granted, because it wasn't clear to me in reading her that she wanted to go all the way to saying that once we have just and unjust, that it was a simple matter to then say that the just was the good.

31:00 Wes: No, she's not saying it's a simple matter. She's saying that's the 50 year project.

31:04 Dylan: So she's on board with that. Right? The justice associated with the Good. But it seemed to me that she really wanted to acknowledge that there's a separate justification that needs to be made in order to do that, but that there was still force, and I can't avoid the word value to making the distinction between just and unjust that actually had content to it, that the notion of moral ought doesn't have in her mind, and that the question of just and unjust was in fact, for her, clearer. It was a question of a matter of fact, that you could say that action was just and that action was unjust, absent of a judgment that they were necessarily wrong, that the judgment of whether they're wrong or good or bad is a completely separate judgment.

31:50 Wes: And the reason why she thinks that is because she has in mind this case of the killing of innocents.

31:56 Dylan: Yes.

31:57 Wes: Where it's very obviously an unjust thing to do for whatever reason. But if you're a consequentialist, you may come up with some scenario under which you think it's the good thing to

32:07 Dylan: do, the morally right thing to do.

32:09 Wes: Yeah. Say the dirty hands problem, dropping nuclear bombs on Japanese cities in order to end World War II.

32:15 Dylan: Yeah. In fact, that's exactly how she ends the essay, as that is her central complaint that the modern moralists take you down this road of even having this discussion, which she considers sort of despicable in its essence, that you would even consider that you could slimily contort yourself, that, oh, well, I'm a bigger man because I'm willing to do the immoral thing for the greater moral good kind of thing. And she thinks that's just total horseshit. And that's basically what she says. I think if she could have cursed.

32:49 Philosophy: Yeah. That's not a language exaggeration. That's different words, but not stronger words than she would use.

32:53 Dylan: Yeah, right.

32:54 Mark: Isn't that the impetus to the whole essay is that before this she had written protesting Cambridge University's awarding of sort of an honorary doctorate or something to Harry Truman. And she wanted to say that. No, actually what he did in bombing those people was just plain wrong. So that's really what drove the whole thing, which it seems funny that it looks like she's trying to be. You know, you might read this. She's trying to be a moral anti realist or something. She's against moral philosophy. She wants us to throw out moral notions of ought. But the reason she wants to do that is so that she could be a moral absolutist about certain things, like killing innocents.

33:30 Philosophy: Right. It's not that she Wants to throw out ethics. She wants to throw out the ethical philosophy we've already done. She thinks we just took a wrong turn and we've been on that road for 200 years.

33:38 Wes: And again, you know, the two readings, I think with the other essay, War and Murder. Yeah, War and Murder, Double Effect, I think it was written for a Christian journal. Right. And there's lots of references to Christianity. So it's completely plausible to think that whether or not she's interested in virtue ethics, I think she also seems to think that the word of God has some moral relevance for her community.

34:00 Mark: When she points out in that essay,

34:02 Wes: really, is she a relativist?

34:03 Philosophy: She says like we're like.

34:04 Wes: Well, she doesn't say that, but she

34:06 Mark: says like we're like the Jews were in ancient times, we Catholics now, where we're side of the chosen people. That pretty much the fact that we have this revelation that we stick to means that we start with these assumptions and can therefore sort of. We're playing our, I would say, language game. But obviously she doesn't consider it a game. But it's comparable that this is a community that therefore can have because they have these underlying assumptions about divine law, then can have a starting point for doing Catholic ethics. But she doesn't think that she could use those arguments outside of that context. And that's why she doesn't in modern philosophy or intentionally.

34:45 Wes: Well, I don't think she thinks those arguments would be persuasive with a non Catholic group, but I don't think that means that she doesn't think that they wouldn't be binding. You don't get off the hook by not being a Christian if Christianity is the truth. I mean, I don't think she's a relativist in that sense.

35:00 Mark: No.

35:01 Philosophy: I think it's a mistake to push either of the two readings onto it to say that she's definitely arguing for something like virtue ethics or that she's definitely arguing we should return to a law conception. Virtue ethics is what has historically emerged from this and ends up being really important. And all sorts of work is being done on that now. But I read this as much more of like, here are your fucking options, guys. You can't do this law thing without a lawgiver. That isn't you. And no one seems to want to go back to the law thing, which is what she says.

She says, I don't think we need to go back to a law thing. I think Aristotle gives us the tools we need. So our options are press onward without the law thing. But let's get rid of this sense of ought. Or if you don't want to do that, then you got to bring in a big guy with a big divine gun to back your legal interpretation. I think either option's open to her. She favors one.

35:55 Wes: But I think listeners should know that all these strains of ethics are alive and well and there's work being done in all of them. So the Humean and the deontological and the consequentialist or utilitarian and virtue ethics. So if she wants to discard those again, I wish there had been a more detailed persuasive argument to that effect. And I don't buy her historical account that the law version of ethics comes from Christianity and so on and so forth.

36:20 Philosophy: Wes, she was simply stating those objections with the brevity which the character makes possible.

36:24 Wes: Yes, brevity, just brutal. We should maybe get to the double effect thing, since we were sort of honing in on that.

36:31 Mark: Sure, let's bring it in. We don't have to be done with the modern moral philosophy essay, but let's bring it in.

36:35 Wes: So the idea, right, is that as a consequentialist, you might say, well, I'm balancing the total good outcome of dropping nuclear bombs on Japanese cities, and the overall outcome will be the best, best outcome. And so that's the one I'm going to take. And her idea is that if you actually intend to kill a bunch of innocent people as a means to your end, then that's the end of that discussion. That's immoral. Which is not to say that you can't do something with foreseen negative consequences which could be the right thing to do. So this idea of double effect, it's the difference between foreseen consequences that are negative and then some negative consequence that you actually intend.

So for Truman to drop those bombs, actually killing people was an essential part of the plan to end the war. And that's what I think, in Anscombe's eyes, makes it immoral. I think someone else could probably explain that better than I did.

37:29 Philosophy: Right. So here's what the double effect is. You're going to do something, it's going to have a good effect and a bad effect. Can I do that thing? Well, here's a way to decide. One is, is the action itself you're doing either good or not. It has to be not bad. So right off the gate, you can't, like murder or steal in order to get both a good and a bad effect. So if killing Someone. Well, I guess killing is not necessarily the example you want to go.

37:56 Mark: Killing innocence is the only thing that's really bad, right?

38:00 Philosophy: So killing innocence is. You can't do that.

38:02 Wes: You can kill an innocent as long as it's not a intended act, right? So you can give someone pain medication that will kill them as long as the intention is to alleviate their pain.

38:13 Philosophy: So two, the bad effect can't be like in the causal chain to the good effect. So the Truman example, there is a good one. Like Truman on the way to surrender was, well, if I kill enough people with two bombs, that will demonstrate our power, which will cause them to surrender. And there the bad thing is on its way is in the causal chain to the good thing. That's not allowed. Three, you have to only intend the good thing. So if you're going to blow up a factory and the explosion is also going to set fire to a village nearby, say the bomber can't be in the plane. Like, all right, villagers are going to burn. He has to be like, no, this is serious. I just want to blow up the factory. It's really too bad, that other thing. And four, the good thing has to outweigh the bad thing. You can't burn a city to get a small factory.

39:00 Wes: It helps to have a nice pair of blinders that you can put on at the appropriate time.

39:06 Mark: I really had a hard time in reading her talking about the double effect in war and murder, knowing actually where she stood on it because she is trying to defend a certain version of it, but she immediately jumps to pointing out how it is abused. One example I think that she gives, actually, in the modern moral philosophy essay that really shows this fundamental intuition about the difference between outcomes that you intend and outcomes that you don't intend is this one about, I'm in a situation where I have to do something really slimy, and if I don't do that, I'm going to end up going to jail.

And if I end up going to jail, well, then my kids will not receive my material support. So the question is, can I do the really slimy thing on the utilitarian grounds that, well, I don't want to go to jail and thereby deprive my kids of that support. And she says, no, because there's a difference. You're not responsible. The thing that you intend in not doing the slimy action is just to not do the slimy action so your intentions are good. The fact that something bad also happens because of that, that your kids go without, is a foreseen Effect, you know that's going to happen.

You're going to go to jail if you don't do the horrible thing. But it's not what you intend, so it's okay. So that's a good use of the principle of double effect, right?

40:18 Wes: Yeah.

40:18 Mark: She thinks that's what the consequentialists have been ignoring. That points out what's again, bad about consequentialism of any sort.

40:25 Wes: And this goes towards what Bro was saying about where it lies in the causal chain, right?

40:29 Mark: Yeah.

40:30 Wes: So on the one hand, it's about intention, but you can't just say, oh, it was a foreseen consequence, but I didn't intend it. Right.

40:37 Mark: That's how it's abused.

40:38 Wes: That foreseen consequence cannot be a means to your end because then you are forced to intend it. If it's a means to your end, it is definitely intentional.

40:47 Dylan: In this whole discussion, I thought about Oedipus, especially with all her bringing up Greek stuff.

40:53 Wes: And incest.

40:55 Dylan: Yes. Because whenever you think about the Greeks, you think of incest. Right.

40:58 Mark: And pulling out. Sorry.

41:00 Dylan: And pulling out. Yes. Wasn't that brilliant? Anyway, it seems to me in the way you guys have been talking about it, Oedipus shouldn't understand himself as culpable in any way for having slept with his mother and fathered his sister or whatever it was. It killed his father because he didn't intend to do that. He didn't know that. And when you talk about this in class, that's where the discussion lies often. How could he have known that he didn't know that it was his mother that he was sleeping with. How could it be wrong? And yet he accepts it as that he's guilty of it, that he committed this terrible act. And I was a little uncertain how she would come down on this. The way you guys are talking is he would clearly be absolved of it. He is not guilty of the action.

41:49 Philosophy: Certainly morally, I think, for her, that language of absolution needs to be, in a religious framework, be absolved of it. Who would God hold them culpable? Well, that's a question for God, and ethics can't really seem to answer that.

42:02 Dylan: Let me go back to the way of talking about it that we were just discussing that she seemed to be comfortable with, which involved the question of murder and the double effect. Right. And I thought in the argument of the double effect, it's exactly that Oedipus would understand himself as not being culprit. Maybe that's a better word. Let's Put forgiveness or something, or the judgment of absolving him off to the side that he is not culpable for that action because he did not intend it and he had no way of foreseeing that. And that's exactly the language that we've been using and she used to characterize this question of war and murder.

42:42 Philosophy: So the double effect in that context we want to be talking about, like, here's a thing that's going to have a good and a bad effect. The good effect in the context of Oedipus is what? He just is able to rule Thebes.

42:55 Mark: Yeah.

42:55 Dylan: He fell in love, he became king. He ruled Thebes as a great king.

42:59 Mark: Oh.

42:59 Dylan: But it turns out to be his mother.

43:02 Philosophy: Don't you hate it when that happens?

43:03 Wes: Oedipus isn't weighing any. He's blind to the fact that it's his mother. So he's not weighing good and bad. There's no double effect example here.

43:11 Mark: Well, there's an unintended.

43:12 Wes: It's unintended. Yeah. It's completely unintended.

43:14 Philosophy: Yeah. The double effect is a decision criteria. Now, if he knew, well, I'd have to fuck my mother. But on the other hand, I only

43:24 Mark: intend to leave Thebes. I only intend to do that. I need to fuck my mother.

43:28 Dylan: Okay. So in this case, it's related, but a different category of discussion. So it's not a double effect question.

43:35 Philosophy: Right.

43:35 Dylan: But there is the question of intention regarding. I don't want to say morality, because she doesn't want to use that word, but I guess culpability or something like that.

43:44 Mark: Just to bring back in the thing from modern moral philosophy that what we want to do when we see that is, well, is he okay or not? And that's not the question that you ask for Anscombe, that there are irreducible individual. You might call him again, language games. So if you ask, was sleeping with his mother killing his father sort of an unclean, sickening act? Yes. Whether you know it or not, it is an unclean, sickening act. But at the same time, because of the extenuating circumstance, we would forgive him. But that doesn't get rid of the bad. You don't end up summing those things together to come up with a global moral judgment.

44:19 Wes: The other relevant thing here, though, is that you could see this as flowing from his character in some way. So substituting, really, the story is about fate. Right. But in more relevant terms, we might think of fate in terms of character. Someone is driven, even if unconsciously, to do these Bad things. And we could certainly, in Aristotelian terms, judge him to be of poor character. Even if he hasn't consciously intended these things. He could just be that kind of person. I'm not claiming that I endorse this reading, but that kind of person who gets into that kind of trouble.

44:52 Philosophy: Well, to be clear, he gets in trouble because he murders his father in a rage.

44:56 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point.

44:57 Philosophy: There is a moment in the action of his life though it's before the action of the play because it's a Greek tragedy. It's one day in medias res. But there is a moment where he does a thing that everyone is on board with. Ooh, yeah, you shouldn't have done that. You shouldn't have killed the old man in the crosswalk in a fit of rage, which he does. And it happens to be his father. And that sets off the chain of events. So there is like a clear moment of moral culpability for Oedipus.

45:21 Wes: Yep.

45:21 Philosophy: In this specific example, you shouldn't have

45:23 Mark: been texting while you were driving. I know. In itself that does not seem horrible because horrible things came out of that

45:29 Philosophy: because you couldn't even hammer and chisel with one hand back then. You had to have no hands on the wheel.

45:33 Wes: In Oedipus's defense, the old man does whip him because he's simply walking in the road and getting in his way. So it's really, it's a road rage. It all starts with road rage.

45:42 Dylan: It's all about the star bellied sneetches and the plain bellied.

45:46 Philosophy: Right.

45:47 Wes: But I think, yeah, that's a great pull.

45:49 Dylan: But the way Mark characterized it seemed like the just unjust thing is that you would say, well, it's a matter of fact that it was an unclean action. But the question of whether or not you were culpable for it is a different question. So you could say, well, that was an unjust or a just action. But the question of whether or not you are culpable for that is a different question.

46:12 Mark: Or what you're going to do realizing that it's an unjust or just action. So she thinks that even though Hume was wrong, was a sophist, that he pointed out some valuable things that set up some interesting problems to explore. And one was the idea that no recognition of a property of something is sufficient to actually get you to do something. Hume then took that as, okay, well, then the rationalists are wrong that it's not that I just perceive, say that there's a Fitness, objective fitness between beneficence and gratitude. That's one of the prime rationalist examples.

And thereby it is good for me to be gracious in the face of beneficence or to have gratitude. And so I should do that and I do it. That Hume saw that just that sort of recognition would not actually get anybody to do anything. So he then had to say that, okay, well it must be rooted in desires, in things that already move us. Well, Anscombe just really wants to separate those things out. Say no, that the idea of fitness, of gratitude and beneficence actually might be a perfectly legitimate thing. It's just that that's not a paradigm case of sort of the moral and something that you then should do.

It's just it's recognizing what it is that gratitude and beneficence fits. You can acknowledge the individual, what we might call moral facts, but don't crowd them together in this class of moral facts. Just acknowledge something as rude or as unjust or whatever. And those are just all things that we can learn about and that it's a separate issue what you're gonna do based on that.

47:40 Philosophy: Yeah, that seems right.

47:41 Dylan: Does she get anywhere elsewhere with this 50 year project that we pleaded with Wes to allow her to make the move to saying that those just actions are good and unjust actions are bad? I mean, clearly that's where she falls in the war and murder case and other examples.

47:59 Wes: There's been a long literature now on this and an ongoing debate and of it's not resolved. But listeners can look at the virtue ethics entry of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. And Moral Naturalism is also a great Stanford entry to look at these attempts to ground morality in, let's say, moral psychology or philosophical psychology, I think is the way Anscombe puts it. I think again, they run into very serious fundamental problems. And I don't see those problems simply going away. They're problems that have been around for a long time.

And the basic problem is that virtue ethics ends up seeming to be one of its proponents. Philippa Foot even explicitly made this argument that all we're left with is these hypothetical imperatives, that in fact we do simply abandon moral language as we're used to it, which I think is fine as long as you're explicit about that. Right. But then you lose the ability to use the kind of moral language that people very typically use. And then you get to some very counterintuitive and unpalatable sorts of examples. I think. I mean, it's a fascinating project Right.

The virtue ethics project. But I think to say, oh, in some number of years it's going to solve this problem, I don't see that.

49:07 Philosophy: Well, all right.

49:08 Mark: I don't see her fulfilling any significant part of that. So I want to focus on what positive she does have to say. So maybe this is a good time to move to intention and talk about the way that she thinks that we can. I don't know if I would characterize it in the way that broke did on the Precog, as this is just an extension of what she was recommending. This is part of that project of doing the moral psychology. I really thought it was something quite different, but certainly it's related in a way that's already been pointed out. Right. That Dylan already brought up.

The main example from the part of intention that we read of a guy is pumping water into a house and it happens that that water is poisonous and that all the people in the house will be poisoned, but they're Nazis. And the guy believes, or he's been told by the person who put the poison in there that if he kills the Nazis, then a much superior government will take its place and in fact bring about heaven on earth. And there's some rather exaggerated. So the question then is how do you talk about what the guy is doing in pumping? What is the action that he's taking?

And the thing that we haven't brought up yet that is really crucial to this whole thing is that she doesn't really believe that you can analyze actions. Exactly. You have to analyze actions under descriptions. And therefore you have to understand how the various descriptions of an action relate to each other. That by pumping water you could describe his action as he's moving his arm up and down. You could describe it as he's pumping water into the house, you could describe it as he's poisoning those people and sort of which one of those in order to have any clarity.

So my thesis is that she's not trying to do an overall ethics anywhere, but she thinks that you can sort of do these localized ethics or within language games. So what would be a vile thing to do? If you don't want to use the word evil, but she does allow words like, I don't know, she doesn't use actually vile. But what would be a mean spirited thing to do or something like that?

51:01 Philosophy: Well, she would just want you to name the kind of evil it is. So she would just be like. So she would want you to say like an unjust thing or an uncharitable thing. Or something like that. Yeah.

51:10 Mark: So you have to be clear about how to talk about actions if you want to be able to say, in virtue of what is this unjust? Because the same action can be given many different descriptions. And I actually thought this was a brilliant. I like the formulation that she gave against Kant, which is a similar one that we've given several times. And in fact, just Sartre in our last episode had something very similar. That the reason the categorical imperative doesn't really work in its first formulation. The only do what you can universalize its maxim, so that would become a natural law, is that, you know, the way we talked about in the past is that you could describe any given action through a number of maxims.

What principle are you trying to enact by doing this? Anscombe's formulation of that is just under what description does the action come? And just thinks that this is a knockdown argument against both Kantianism and utilitarianism.

51:57 Philosophy: Right. Against Mill, too.

51:58 Mark: Yeah. You could describe one in the same action as, I was just winning the war for the Allies. That's good. Oh, but I can also describe the same action as I was killing, I was bombing two cities full of people. That those are two descriptions of the same action. And we have to understand the relation between those in order to even start

52:15 Wes: on ethics with the maxims. Right. The classic problem is how specific do you get? How many circumstances do you specify? Right. So is hiding Anne Frank and lying to the Nazis when they come to your door, is that universalizable as lying? Am I universalizing lying or am I universalizing lying in this particular circumstance? Or maybe to put it under a completely different description, am I universalizing hiding an innocent, so on and so forth.

52:41 Mark: Right. So talking about what is your intention or what is the description, and letting your language of descriptions be guided by this analysis of intention that she gives is a promising way, seemingly to talk about that.

52:52 Philosophy: Right. But in order for intention to become relevant, she has to recover the idea that our intentions matter to the actions that we do. Right. So there are lots of different descriptions. She doesn't want to solve that problem where she says, like, oh, great, so here's a description of what's going on. But to deal with this, lots of different descriptions. It has to be the case that when someone intends something or we can decide what a person intends, and once we know what they intend, we have a better sense of how what they're doing affects them. And she thinks we need to do more work there. But once she gets like, well, if he intends to be poisoning them, that's an unjust thing that he intends to be doing that's going to affect his flourishing problematically, but it avoids this weighing lots of different competing descriptions.

53:39 Mark: Where do you see in that essay her talking about. What's important about that is whether he's flourishing and doing it or not? I don't see that at all. It's. The question is about whether it's right for him to be poisoning these people or not. Or can he just say, I'm just doing my job. I pump the water every day, and so I'm gonna pump it today, even though I know in this case that it'll kill the people inside. And that hasn't been the case in past days. Is it morally defensible for him just to say, I don't care, I'm just. I do my job. Whatever's the case.

54:05 Philosophy: You're right that she's not making any specific claims, but she does talk about how at a certain point, only he has access to what his real intention is. He might be lying to us and there might be ways to get around that or to do more investigating.

54:19 Mark: Can he be in bad faith? Sure.

54:21 Philosophy: And so let's say he says, like, I'm just doing my job, so I'm just pumping this water. That's my job. I'm just doing it. Just trying to get paid, that's all. And then you were to say, oh, it's funny you say that because you're fired or something like that. Like, didn't you hear? Or they don't need your services this week, you can discontinue. And if he gets pale and sweaty at that point, like, well, I have known these people for so long, I might as well. It's like, oh, were you just trying to poison them? Are you really? Is that why you're continuing? But only he really knows what his intention is at a certain point.

54:54 Mark: At a certain point. But that's only a very small sliver. Like, she really emphasizes throughout this, that intention is not just a private thing. In fact, this is in Back in the War and Murder essay, something she explicitly argues against. That the way that people cheat on the double effect problem is by saying the intention is a purely mental thing. And in fact, it's a matter of my will that I can just right now intend to move my arm. I can intend to. To be looking at this. I can do all make. I can change my will so therefore,

55:25 Philosophy: so, like rehearsing mentally that, like, I'm just. I'm Just doing my job. I'm just doing my job. Like that doesn't overcome the problem.

55:31 Mark: Yes. That it really is a public matter, sort of what the. To a great extent.

55:36 Philosophy: Or it can be a matter of public investigation. Right.

55:38 Mark: Yes. And makes the Wittgensteinian claim associated with that is if you think what intention is, is a certain feeling that you have while you're doing something, then, well, what exactly is that feeling? Like, is there really an image, Is there a sensory thing that, like, I'm intending to do this, that is common to all acts of intention or even all acts of intending this particular thing. This is one of the first things that she sort of jettisons that it's not a phenomenal. She's not a phenomenalist, again thing, that there's something conventional and public about it.

56:08 Dylan: I think that's why she characterizes intention as always answering the question of why.

56:13 Mark: Yes.

56:14 Dylan: And so it gets towards that distinction that you're talking about, Mark.

56:19 Mark: Right. Without being a behaviorist. And she thinks that accusations that Wittgenstein was a behaviorist or a verificationist are unfounded. It's not just that the act of intending is exhausted by some particular action. You moved your arm and it wasn't an accident. So therefore what the intending was is just the movement of the arm. It's not that it's definitely something on top of it.

56:42 Dylan: But yeah, that's where I think these sections are really, really useful and very interesting is she acknowledges that to me, it just seemed like a distinction between a causal account and another kind of account that both were answers to the question of why. And I was kind of wondering, well, exactly what do you mean when you say that the answer to the question of why are you moving your arm up and down? That's in order to move the lever up and down. That's why I'm moving my arm up and down. And that kind of question that seems kind of weird to say that that was an answer to a why question.

And towards the end of this, she seems to acknowledge that the distinction might be really a how question. And it's in section 26. And she's talked about these different kinds of intentions and this question of swallowing up of intentions that you can have this chain of intentions really become one intention.

57:36 Mark: Say more about that before we get. Because that's pretty confusing. Okay, I can give the example or you can keep going.

57:42 Philosophy: So we're in 26, right?

57:43 Dylan: Yeah. So we're at the end of 26, and I was just going to read that.

57:46 Mark: Oh, yeah, go ahead.

57:47 Dylan: Sort of the last paragraph in which she's gone through and she has four different descriptions of the same action.

57:53 Mark: I think it's the ones we've just given. He's moving his arms, he's pumping the water, he's moving the lever. He's poisoning the people.

58:00 Dylan: Yes.

58:01 Mark: Liberating Germany.

58:02 Philosophy: So moving his arms to move the lever to pump the water, to poison

58:05 Mark: the people, to free the land, maybe.

58:07 Dylan: Right. Yes. So then she says, so there is one action with four descriptions, each dependent on wider circumstances and each related to the next as descriptions of means to end, which means that we can speak equally well of four corresponding intentions, or of one intention. The last term that we have brought in in the series, by making it the last term so far brought in, we have given it the character of being the intention so far discovered with which the act in its other descriptions was done. Thus, when we speak of four intentions, we are speaking of the character of being intentional that belongs to the act in each of the four descriptions.

But when we speak of one intention, we are speaking of intention with which the last term we give in such a series gives the intention with which the act in each of its other descriptions was done. And this intention, so to speak, swallows up all the preceding intentions with which earlier members of the series were done. The mark of this swallowing up is that it is not wrong to give D as the answer to the question why about A. A is being done with the question the answer why about A. So what that means is that in the series that we just described is that it's not wrong to say that the reason for pumping his arm is to kill the Nazis.

That's not wrong. And so that intention has swallowed up all the other ones in that kind of causal chain.

59:34 Philosophy: If it is the case that he wants to kill the Nazis.

59:36 Dylan: Yes.

59:36 Philosophy: She's not necessarily committing him to that.

59:39 Dylan: Yes. She's not saying that any one of those intentions overrides them. But if it is the case that the intention was to kill the Nazis, then all the other intentions in that chain are swallowed up by that one. And so you could speak of there being one intention, not there being four intentions.

59:55 Philosophy: Right. But you can also create sort of chains of intention. Right. So she talks about him clicking out God Save the Queen.

1:00:02 Dylan: Yes.

1:00:02 Philosophy: And you might say, why are you doing that? And he's like, it's my favorite song. Like, not the clicking part, the other, the actual physical pumping.

1:00:08 Dylan: Yes.

1:00:09 Philosophy: And those are separate chains of intention.

1:00:11 Dylan: Yes.

1:00:12 Philosophy: Whereas what you're saying is, here are Four descriptions that all fall in the same chain. So let's just jump to the end. That's the intention with which he's acting.

1:00:20 Mark: This is that natural language philosophy that is really. She's saying, don't we, when we talk about these things, use them interchangeably. That if I say, if somebody asks you, what are you doing? I'm moving my arms.

1:00:31 Philosophy: Why?

1:00:32 Mark: Well, why? Well, because I'm going to pump the water as opposed to just say I'm pumping the water. Like you could use that either way.

1:00:39 Philosophy: Right.

1:00:39 Mark: And it really just depends how remote the thing. Like if you said, what are you doing? I'm freeing the country. Well, that's a big step. I mean, if it really was the case that for sure pumping this water will kill these Nazis and that will free the country, then yeah, okay, you could say I'm freeing the country and then I would have to have that explained to me more. But most likely in any real situation, even if you hope that this will free the country, you're not really sure of that. So you don't want to just say I'm freeing the country. You're saying I'm killing the Nazis, and hopefully that will lead to this other thing. In that case, the killing the Nazis is not swallowed up by the intention to free the country in that way.

1:01:18 Philosophy: I think it is. I think that to kill the Nazis to free the country, I think it's swallowed up because it's in the same chain. Right? So we can probably continue this chain. Why are you killing Nazis? To free the country. Why? And then eventually you might get to something like a Wittgensteinian explanation to come to an end. Because the country should be free. Fuck you is why. But I think that to free the country does swallow up. To kill the Nazis in the same way to kill the Nazis swallows up poisoning the well. And poisoning the well swallows up pumping the water.

1:01:49 Mark: Okay, maybe I'm just conflating two points that you're interpreting this swallows up as being a matter of. Like he says in this example that you take the last one in the chain, you say this is the end for which the others were the means, the earlier ones.

1:02:02 Dylan: Right?

1:02:02 Philosophy: This is the intention.

1:02:04 Mark: However, you can't actually, as a matter of even if you have a long term goal in doing something in another place. I think in the section that we read together, he says that just because there's a means end relationship, if the further end is uncertain, then it doesn't swallow it up in the sense that we don't have to talk about the earlier end anymore, I'm a little confused.

1:02:24 Wes: And the Nazis are not innocents, so there's no problem with intending their death. Right?

1:02:30 Philosophy: I think that's right. Anyone going to come out in a strong defense of Nazis?

1:02:33 Wes: It's not analogous to the case of dropping bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

1:02:37 Mark: I don't think she explicitly relates this to either of those things.

1:02:40 Wes: Right, but you're talking about swallowing up maybe a misunderstanding throughout this book.

1:02:44 Mark: Intention. She's making these very fine analytical distinctions between different ways of talking about actions. And so she starts off the whole book in saying, what's the difference between having an intention that something is the case and merely predicting that it will be the case? And she sort of goes from there. And so every, you know, what makes an action voluntary as opposed to involuntary? Well, you know, we already said that that depends on what description that is given of it. That if I'm doing something intentionally, but maybe it's producing some unintended consequence.

So in that the same action could be described as voluntary, involuntary. This is the kind of distinction she's constantly making. So in the same way she talks about the difference between I'm going to make the tea as a future tense and I'm making the tea that we use those more or less interchangeably because, well, what are you doing right now? Well, I'm picking up the pot and filling it with water. That's what I'm doing. Well, so I'm saying making the tea swallows up that description of the means because it really is amounts linguistically amounts to the same thing.

But even though I'm killing the Nazis ultimately to free the country, linguistically freeing the country does not swallow up killing the Nazis. Like an explanation is required there. There really is not a 100%. It's not like I'm blowing up the world destroying bomb.

1:04:04 Philosophy: So at the beginning of 22, she says, if a description of some future state of affairs makes sense just by itself as an answer to the question, then it is an expression of intention. Is that what you're getting at that like it has to make sense?

1:04:16 Mark: Yes, it is really two intentions or two actions that I am intending to kill the Nazis and I also intend that that will free the country. Those are separate in an important way. As far as linguistic usage goes. Even though one is supposed to be the means for the other in a way that, that I'm pumping the water and that's supposed to kill the Nazis are not separable.

1:04:38 Philosophy: Right. So I'm pumping water swallows up, I'm moving My arms, in a way, somehow more so or more completely than to free the country swallows up to poison these Nazis.

1:04:49 Mark: Right. In the fact that sort of, the more something is swallowed up, the less sense it would make if somebody asked you why you're doing it, to say, you know, what are you doing? Well, I'm moving my arms. No, you're being an asshole by giving me that answer. Is what you're doing. Tell me what you're doing in terms of what you actually intend to do.

1:05:04 Philosophy: And then at the end of 26, the last paragraph is another implication of what I call swallowing up is that nothing definite has to hold about how many terms we place between A and D. For example, in the imagined case, we did not put in a term making the water flow along the pipes, which yet would take its place in the series if anyone thought of asking the question why about it. So we can dice this up as fine as you like. We can describe this action really minisculely and we would hate that, but it's a thing that we can totally do. Swallowing up, I think for her is a way to shortcut. That is to say, okay, so where are we going with this?

1:05:41 Mark: I'm getting to heaven.

1:05:42 Philosophy: What are you doing? I'm getting to heaven. Okay, well, okay, so slow down.

1:05:45 Mark: Back up.

1:05:46 Philosophy: That's too far. But I'm poisoning some Nazis. It's like, all right, I don't need much explanation there. I can fill in the gaps myself.

1:05:53 Dylan: Well, but she characterizes this in this exact section as she invokes a distinction between why and how. And that seems to me to be exactly what's going on. Right. When you have those distinctions that we were talking about, you ask your teenager, what are you doing in the kitchen? So I'm standing here. That's the 14 year old answer to the fact that they're making breakfast for themselves. And then you have the question, well, I am feeding my soul so that I can grow to be a better human being. It's another kind of answer, right?

1:06:24 Philosophy: I think how just moves the other direction. Like how is like the reverse operation almost.

1:06:28 Dylan: But I wonder about that. Maybe that's what she meant. How is essentially another version of why. But that distinction between how and why, especially with this Aristotelian background, seemed to me to be the distinction between efficient cause and what's the final cause. Final cause, right. And she seemed to be making that distinction between efficient cause and final cause. And I wondered about that, whether she was saying, well, answers to the question of how are just another version of answers to the question of why in a simple way. Because earlier in the earlier sections, they seemed to be that way. She had all kinds of answers to the question of why that she said these are answers to why and therefore about intention, which really seemed to be questions of how.

1:07:17 Wes: How.

1:07:17 Mark: Right. Not all questions why are questions about intention. That she defines intention as certain kinds of answers to the question why?

1:07:24 Philosophy: Ultimately, I think how literally just goes the opposite direction as why. The third to last paragraph of 26, where she says something like, so A is being done with B as intention does not mean that D is only indirectly the intention of A. Like this well pressing example, which is to say, yeah, we can put a B between A and D. That doesn't mean I'm pumping the water indirectly to get to the Nazis. That just means there's a description in between. And then she says if D is given an answer to the question why so I'm trying to kill Nazis is a description of why A, B, and C can all make an appearance in answer to how. If you asked how moving my arms, pumping this water, doing my job. All perfectly valid responses. So how is like the subtraction to wise addition. I think it just goes the opposite direction down the chain.

1:08:12 Mark: And I like you adding in the direct and indirect that that shows whether something is swallowed up or not, that I'm indirectly freeing the country by doing the pumping, but I'm directly killing the people.

1:08:23 Philosophy: Right. So directness and indirectness. I think you're right, Mark. I think that gets at that distinction where like freeing the country. All right, I need more explanation. Poisoning Nazis. Oh, I don't need much more. There's poison in the water, isn't there? I'll bet that that's what that is.

1:08:35 Mark: Great.

1:08:35 Philosophy: I've got. Got it. I'm there.

1:08:36 Dylan: Is there any difference here other than that between efficient and final cause that she's making?

1:08:41 Philosophy: I don't think she's making those distinctions. I think with respect to how, she's just saying just like Y could have answers A through D. And all of those are valid answers to Y. If you were to ask how are you ding A through C also all valid responses.

1:08:58 Dylan: Yeah, but that sounds like saying that I am talking about what are the causes of D and what are the causes of A through C? And sometimes when I say what I mean by those causes, I speak of the causes that are deficient causes, that one thing leads to another another way in which I mean those causes are the causes for the end of which that I do them. The why? It sounds like exactly the same thing.

1:09:22 Mark: I think you're asking a very complicated question. I read the Modern Moral Philosophy essay in this collection that I got. If you look up Anscombe on Amazon, one of the first things that comes up is Human Life, Action and Ethics essays. And I gotta caution people against buying that because actually Modern Moral Philosophy is the only well known essay to be included in that. The rest of it is all things that, after Anscombe died, were left out of her four volume collected works. The rest of the essays are really scraping the bottom of the barrel or like, you know, lecture that she gave it somewhere.

So I sort of skimmed through a bunch of the essays and in one of them it brought up this issue briefly about types of causality. And really she wanted to say that, yes, Aristotle was going the right direction in talking about that there are different types of causality, like efficient, final, but just, I think says in an offhand way. But actually we need many more kinds than just the kinds that he spelled out. So, yes, you're right that she wants to embrace this sort of plurality, but her solution is not going to map straight onto Aristotle's or something.

She thinks that, you know, that's why she needs a whole book to talk about why. This intention book, it's not just a simple matter of final cause.

1:10:29 Dylan: The thing that rings to me in the swallowing up and the distinction we're making is that I have this chain. I can substitute my why for a how. And they proceed in what seemed like a physical causal chain that at some level you could abstract or just absent the question of will from them. And then you have to jump a gap. And she characterizes it as a gap. In the modern morality paper, you have to jump a gap. And that gap involves something that is not an answer to a how question. It's an answer to a why question that can't be cast as a how question. And it's not something that is a physical contingency. And it really is characterized by an act that's peculiar to something we really mean by intention.

1:11:20 Mark: Yes, a human action, she calls it,

1:11:22 Dylan: in some places a human action.

1:11:24 Mark: Human actions are more than voluntary. There's something very specific about that term for her.

1:11:28 Philosophy: Yeah, I'm not clear on how you're understanding her use of how, because the way you're talking about it sounds like it runs in the same direction as why. Is that what you're saying? That how is just a causal chain? And that eventually you have to abandon just causation.

1:11:45 Dylan: That's what it seemed like to me is that there's a whole chain of whys that also are understood as hows.

1:11:51 Philosophy: That's what's throwing off alarm bells is the hows and the whys aren't the same thing. They're like inverses of each other.

1:11:57 Dylan: Well, okay, so as inverses of each other, maybe there is a different direction to them. I'd have to think about that a little bit. But the mere fact of their reflectability makes me think that they're the same thing. There's a particular difference in the kind of why that comes when you add in D. In her example, skipping that gap and accounting for that gap with an answer to a why question is a different thing you're doing than when you account for the why questions that you could also go backwards on with hows.

1:12:29 Philosophy: Probably every why has a how, but not every how has a why.

1:12:32 Mark: They wouldn't call it a how if it didn't have a why. If you're just doing something, why are you moving your arms? No reason. Then you wouldn't call the moving your arms a how.

1:12:40 Wes: Right.

1:12:41 Mark: There has to be a why.

1:12:42 Philosophy: Well, so, for example, why did you knock that glass over? I don't. It was an accident. How did you knock that glass over? With my elbow. Because I'm dumb. There are hows without whys, and they're precisely that sort of action by a human being that aren't what she wants to call human action.

1:12:57 Mark: Right. Because it was unintentional. You have to have an intention for means. End analysis. You have to have an end.

1:13:05 Philosophy: So here's Maybe this is getting to the question of is she doing something beyond just efficient and final cause? I think so. Right? Because we wouldn't say the knocking the glass over has a final cause. Right. There is no, like, object of that happening. It just sort of happened. Unless you go all the way back to, like, determinism. God made you knock it over because reasons. So in that sense, there's an efficient cause of the water glass getting on the floor, but not like a final cause. That's the way she's going beyond just that simple distinction.

1:13:34 Mark: I think just introducing the idea that there are different descriptions of the same action. I intentionally reached across the table. I did not intentionally knock over the glass, which happened because my arm hit it as I reached across the table. One and the same action by reaching across the table is purposive. So it has a final cause. In other words, an aim that I was trying to slap you. And that's why I reached across the table. And yet you could describe it in a different way and just talk about the efficient cost.

1:14:01 Philosophy: Right. And that would be different from the why and the how.

1:14:03 Mark: Right. I don't want to get sidetracked into Aristotle any further. Yeah, no, because I'm not even sure the way I just described that seems. Actually, now that I think about it, Aristotle would be fine with that. Like, that's why I have four different kinds of causes. Because you can give different analyses of the same action. But certainly he doesn't talk about it in the same way that Anscombe does.

1:14:19 Dylan: Yeah. I didn't mean to get us off track. I just. It was telling to me that she moved to characterizing some of the whys as hows. And I guess I still have to think about whether or not it just as a simple matter goes in the opposite direction, that it's just reflecting a directionality of the whys. But to me, the fact that you could have some whys be associated with hows, directional or not, but other whys, not other kinds of whys, not associated with hows, that seemed to be the telling distinction she was trying to get at. That the analysis of intention, the swallowing up.

1:14:53 Mark: Well, that.

1:14:53 Dylan: The distinction between things that could get swallowed up and things that couldn't get swallowed up. Right. And that's where the distinction between whys that could be associated with hows, those could be swallowed up, but there would be whys that could not be associated with hows, and those are also correspond to the ones that can't get swallowed up.

1:15:13 Mark: Please don't let our talking about whys and hows in this, I think, very laughably confusing way, make you not read the book Intention. Because she doesn't talk like that at all.

1:15:23 Philosophy: No, she's way meaner about it.

1:15:27 Mark: Well, I sensed that Wes was getting impatient with our dwelling on the stuff of intention. Is there anything else from this section we want to pull out, or can we go back to ethics just to finish it off?

1:15:38 Wes: I'm not impatient. I want to hear more about the whys and hows. What about the whens and the where's?

1:15:43 Philosophy: That's. Guys, we've got 50 years to do the where's and the whens. Easy on the wheres and the whens. We need whys and hows first. That's what Sidgwick got wrong. Sidgwick tried to do where's and. Yes.

1:15:55 Mark: So eventually this book, Intention, talks more about Aristotle's Practical reason and other things like that. And the issues that we referred to earlier about does any particular is actually get you to do something? That's sort of what she replaces for the is ought distinction is that all the is is, which include everything that you thought was an ought, that pre. Morally, justice and stuff is all included in is is. But does that actually get you to do anything? That's her substitute distinction. So she does get into some more talk of that in intention. So what have we learned from this talk about whys and how's in its application? I mean, I think we can apply that pretty directly to the double effect. Right.

1:16:33 Philosophy: My intention is to make the Japanese surrender. And if working back with the hows, how, by killing so many of them, it terrifies them. Okay, well, right there. I'm going to stop you right there. That's in your chain of intentions.

1:16:49 Mark: Yes. So you intend all those things because

1:16:51 Philosophy: that's an answer to your how. You can't do that. You intend everything that that swallows up.

1:16:56 Mark: So if you intend the end, and there's only one means to get to the end, or at least you've already chosen some means to get to the end, you intend those means as well.

1:17:04 Philosophy: Right.

1:17:05 Mark: Despite what you might think, you might say, I wasn't thinking about the people, I was just thinking about winning. Well, you're in bad faith, we could say.

1:17:13 Wes: Right.

1:17:13 Philosophy: Whereas if it's like I'm trying to get them to surrender, how? By bombing a munitions factory? How? Just by dropping a bomb. The village next to the munitions factory that gets burned, that never shows up in the house. That's a separate issue that you can

1:17:27 Wes: not intend even if you know it will definitely follow. Even that the village will be destroyed.

1:17:32 Philosophy: It's slightly more complicated than thinking, yeah, bomberman, but yes, you can, like, not intend that even though you see it coming.

1:17:39 Mark: Maybe we should say something about the probability issue that. The other example that we brought up, or I think Wes brought up, that she talks about, is if I intend to cure you by giving this medicine. But I know that there's a good chance it's a dangerous medicine. This is an experimental therapy, and it might kill you, and that's a foreseeable possibility. So we said it's okay to do that because you don't intend to kill them, even though you foresee it as a possibility, what you intend to do is cure them. Well, that seems very different to me because of the uncertainty factor than this example of the munitions factory.

1:18:10 Wes: I thought her example, it was a foreseen consequence, like you're giving a medicine that would definitely kill someone.

1:18:15 Mark: Why Would you want to do that? Then it's gonna make you really healthy before it kills you.

1:18:19 Wes: Because someone is terminally ill, someone's in

1:18:22 Philosophy: so much pain, you have to give them this dose of medicine to even dull their pain. It turns out that's also so much medicine, they'll die two hours later.

1:18:31 Mark: Wow. I completely misunderstood the example. I did not think she was advocating euthanasia. She's not, it seems entirely.

1:18:37 Philosophy: She's advocating a thing that leads to euthanasia.

1:18:40 Wes: She's saying it's not euthanasia. Yeah, she's giving us. It's the rhythm method of euthanasia.

1:18:46 Philosophy: Yes. We can cash out the probabilities thing too, probably. In terms of. Are the consequences the good consequence and the bad consequence are they commensurate. The chance of it killing someone is so much higher than the chance of it saving them and the bad consequence of them dying. Like there aren't incredibly great consequences to outweigh that chance. We can weigh probabilities as outcomes.

1:19:08 Mark: You think she's going to be a consequentialist like this? Probably.

1:19:12 Philosophy: So this is just an epistemic problem now. This isn't a consequence. This isn't like weighing the moral consequences. This is weighing how are things going to go. And in that sense, I think we're allowed to weigh the knowledge.

1:19:22 Wes: Yeah, because you're doing this to get an intention. It's not simply saying whatever is going to be the best. The greatest good for the greatest number is what we're going to choose. You are looking at consequences, but you're doing that because what intention you have depends on those consequences.

1:19:35 Philosophy: Right. I mean, there are three conditions before you get to the proportionality condition of the double effect that all say, hey, don't fucking do a bad thing that you know is bad. So there's lots on the double effect to check back against this consequentialist idea of like, yeah, murder a dictator if it saves enough people, who cares? And then you get to this last. Like, once you've cleared all those barriers and you know the thing you're doing isn't bad, then we can start weighing consequences. This is like the blowing up the guy's machine.

1:19:57 Wes: Exactly.

1:19:59 Philosophy: You can weigh consequences, but in very specific circumstances, that's all you have to do is weighing the consequences.

1:20:05 Wes: So some things just are right and wrong and you can't do them no matter what the consequences involved are. And that's where she differs with the consequentialist. And so in some ways, she resembles a deontologist. It's just that she doesn't want to ground it in the same way.

1:20:18 Mark: Right. And before you get too excited about sympathizing with Anscombe and saying, yeah, I think that really you shouldn't be able to murder innocents. That should always be unjust for what other reasons you end up doing that? There's no weighing that against other things such that you could decide actually it is just in this circumstance to murder the innocent, that that's just never going to happen. So you might agree with that particular example of her absolutism, but she also would say the same thing about sodomy and birth control. Those are things you just don't do. Whereas that's exactly the kind of example that I think utilitarianism was born to address that we have these irrational traditional things and somebody says, well, come on, does sodomy ever actually. Does it really hurt people? Well, okay, maybe you want to do a study and find out the greatest

1:21:04 Wes: sodomy for the greatest number.

1:21:05 Philosophy: I always say, do you mean the most people getting sodomized or you just sodomize the people that will. Because, Wes, that formulation is ambiguous.

1:21:13 Wes: They're all, let's spell out the birth control argument, because that's an interesting one and I think it probably illustrates some complications with double effect.

1:21:20 Mark: So this is just from the Stanford article. This is not what we read.

Right.

But I think it's okay just to ment that you know something that she was accused of, that somehow birth control is bad because you're in the act of having sex, even just pulling out.

1:21:33 Wes: Right. That's the greatest part that's pulling out this bad.

1:21:36 Mark: I'm just looking up what her term for that is.

1:21:38 Wes: You can use the rhythm method, but you can't pull out coitus interruptus. Is that what she uses or. No, she uses something else. That's right.

1:21:44 Mark: Coitus reservatus.

1:21:45 Wes: Reservatus.

1:21:47 Mark: I had not heard that expression. If you do that, if you're pulling out, then you're still intending to do something that is not what marriage is about. You're not intending to do the marriage act, which is what sex is supposed to be, but yet the rhythm method is okay because it's just a consequence. You're doing the marriage act. It's just a foreseen consequence that you won't get pregnant because you're only doing it at times when the month that the woman is infertile. So that's okay because for the double effect reason that you're not intending to just not have a kid. You just happen to be doing something that has the effect of not having a kid.

1:22:22 Wes: Yeah, I find this enormously confusing. Can anyone explain this to me?

1:22:26 Philosophy: So the hows working backwards with the hows. I'm not having a kid. How? By pulling out? Okay, well, that's not allowed. I'm not having a kid. How? By not having sex right now? Well, okay, not having sex. That's a relatively reliable way of not having kids. And I don't think there's like a.

1:22:43 Wes: It's not 100%.

1:22:44 Mark: I thought the whole point of the end is that you're not supposed to try to not have kids. That end in itself.

1:22:49 Wes: No, but I guess this makes sense. You can try to not have kids by not having sex. You can't mix sex with not having kids.

1:22:56 Mark: Well, but that's the point. That's the point of the rhythm method is that you can have sex at certain times.

1:23:00 Wes: Yeah, but the whole thing about contraception or pulling out or whatever, there's an act and you've adulterated that act. You've changed the intention of that act

1:23:08 Philosophy: with the rhythm method. You have to treat the entire method as one big thing in order to intend not to have a kid. And I think Anscombe would want to drill down, so to speak, to each individual act and say, like, my intention in having sex right now is not to not have a kid. My intention is to do that thing with the parts and get pleasure. No one's having sex in the off months.

1:23:31 Wes: Bad, bad pleasure with like, hey, we

1:23:33 Philosophy: need to have sex now so that we don't have a kid. That's not why you're having sex. You're having sex because having sex is great. So in no particular act of sex are you like having sex to not have kids. There are times when you're not having sex to not have kids, and that's fine.

1:23:47 Wes: So we're granting, for the sake of argument, by the way, that having sex just for pleasure is. It's bad. And having procreative sex is good.

1:23:54 Philosophy: I don't know that having sex just for pleasure is bad. I think it's removing the part where procreation is possible.

1:24:00 Wes: Okay, so having intentionally non procreative sex is bad.

1:24:03 Mark: I think it's just that the marriage act involves not pulling out. And she accuses people who pull out of bad faith that they intend to pull out, but then not ejaculate. Because of course, ejaculating just in the air, that's no good. But yet you don't get any. It tends to happen anyway.

1:24:18 Philosophy: It's an airball.

1:24:19 Mark: They tend to ejaculate anyway. And then they claim that it like. Well, I didn't intend to ejaculate. I just intended to have sex and then stop. But it just happens to happen every time. That. That's abuse of the double effect on their part.

1:24:30 Wes: There's so many vulgar things I want to say right now. It's watching too much coitus interruptus porn.

1:24:39 Mark: Oh, maybe that's the difference is coitus reservatus is that you mean to not ejaculate is that you're coitus, but then you reserve.

1:24:46 Wes: You don't even ejaculate.

1:24:47 Mark: I think that's the intent.

1:24:48 Wes: So you're a masochist. It's like wool, Quite as blue as bolus.

1:24:56 Philosophy: What a bummer thing to be arguing about.

1:24:57 Mark: For her.

Yes.

1:24:59 Wes: Sorry, sorry, sorry.

1:25:00 Mark: I just.

1:25:00 Philosophy: No, no, no, not you, Wes. I mean for her specifically. Like, really going after like you gungans, not finishing. Come on. How is that the thing for you? How is that the moral failure of the age that you need to.

1:25:12 Mark: Coitus reservatus, also known as sexual continence, is commonly thought of a form of sexual intercourse in which the penetrated partner does not attempt to ejaculate within the receptive partner, but instead attempts to remain at the plateau phase of intercourse for as long as possible, avoiding the seminal emission. So it's like Sting meditation.

1:25:28 Dylan: Tantric.

1:25:30 Wes: No, Tantric would be if you just prolong the orgasm for hours. This is. It's just prolonging the arousal until you.

1:25:36 Mark: I think you could have the orgasm as long as a dry. A dry one.

1:25:41 Philosophy: So. Okay, so just backing up again, so to speak. Are there still questions about the difference between, like, the rhythm method and pulling out or using contraception? Mark, are you sold on. The rhythm method is somehow like, she can pull this off?

1:26:00 Mark: I think it's ridiculous. I think it shows that it is reductio ad absurdum to her view. Yeah, that's okay to do this. That it's okay to use the rhythm method, but not this other thing. Whereas it seems, if you're not in the middle of a very picky analysis of Catholic doctrine, it is a difference that does not make a difference.

1:26:17 Wes: Well, maybe the way to say it is. It can become difficult to say what is a means and what is an end depending on what description. Description you choose. Because it seems pretty clear that the rhythm method. You intend not to have kids and then you Choose a certain means.

1:26:33 Philosophy: But that means is like just straightforwardly just not having sex.

1:26:37 Wes: Right, right.

1:26:38 Philosophy: To throw in this other having sex at different times. Not really the means to not having sex is we don't have sex at those times.

1:26:43 Wes: But it's also. It's not just not having sex, it's having sex at certain times. I think that's the. So you are still adulterating the act in some sense because you're having sex at times when you know it would be non procreative. And I, I have a lot of trouble seeing the difference between that and say, a condom or something.

1:27:00 Philosophy: Well, raw dog or. Naw, dog. That was Paul vi.

1:27:02 Dylan: Yeah, but, but, but isn't that exactly her point? Right. That's why she would object to the rhythm method is it's just another form of contraceptives. Contraception.

1:27:10 Philosophy: She thinks it's okay.

1:27:11 Wes: The rhythm method's okay. That's the problem.

1:27:13 Philosophy: So. So would you say then that no one should have sex when pregnancy can't happen? Is the Catholic committed to you can only have sex when a woman is fertile?

1:27:23 Mark: No.

1:27:23 Dylan: My recollection of my Catholic upbringing was that that was not one of the requirements that you have to wait till she's in heat before you can have sex. That's not.

1:27:31 Wes: Aren't you required to have at least nine?

1:27:33 Philosophy: It ends up frequently being the case, but it's not a requirement.

1:27:36 Mark: She had four kids.

1:27:38 Philosophy: Well, so that's what I'm saying is no, of course you can have sex even when she's not fertile. Well, then all you're doing is having sex when she's not fertile. That's not a means to not having kids. The means to not having kids for Anscombe is not having sex when she is fertile. And not having sex is a totally okay way to go about not having kids.

1:27:56 Mark: Gotcha.

1:27:58 Dylan: Yeah. So this whole discussion makes it clear to me why there's this interpretation of her argument. She argues that you can't have Divine Command theory, but you must have virtue ethics. Because you get this absurd consequence of virtue ethics, then therefore divine command theory must be correct. In an argument like that, she seems to be, on the one hand acknowledging you have to bring some value or external judgment or law to allow you to make the judgment about these values. But she doesn't talk about any of the reasons why you would do that. I should be very careful about that because I only read 50 pages of her stuff. I don't know if she has Catholic apologies where she goes through and articulates why Catholic doctrine makes sense or not?

1:28:42 Philosophy: I don't. Well, as much fun as this has been, I think it's important to note that, like, she takes herself to be contributing to a specific discussion within a tradition in parts of war and murder. So we shouldn't take that to be like, there's a bunch of background argument already about how, like, somehow my virtue ethics gets me, like, oh, great, look, virtue ethics, Catholicism just falls out of it. I don't think that's what's going on. I think she takes herself to be contributing to an even further, like, an even more specific tradition. And in modern moral philosophy, she's speaking to a wider audience.

And even if she personally, in virtue of being a Catholic, holds something like a divine law interpretation, she's saying like, all right, everyone, look, here are your options. I get it. You don't want to go back to a divine law. That's fine. But then you're pretty much stuck with Aristotle. I'm not mad about Aristotle. No one's mad about Aristotle. But that's pretty much what your options are, are divine law, which party? Or since no one seems to be thrilled with that, you're going to have to go the virtue ethics route. In mmp, she's speaking to a wider audience and saying, you don't have the options that you want.

I think here are the options that you have. She, in other places, like in war and murder, has already said, like, oh, I'm perfectly happy to talk in the divine law context. That's fine for me. I'm just saying everyone else who wants to be like, no, there's no God. Secular morality, well, okay, but you're pretty much stuck with Aristotle there.

1:30:08 Dylan: We often want to demand a universal consistency from someone, and it would point to her allowing a sophistication of her argument that she's going to be making the argument in a particular context and that those contexts need not necessarily be mutually justified. That is, you might not have to be able to go from the context that she has in War and Murder to the context she has in modern moral philosophy. Isn't that something like what you're saying, that those contexts are different?

1:30:41 Philosophy: Yes, I think that's right. There's a sophistication there where she's like, I get that there are different things going on here. And from a historical standpoint. Right. That's difficult to say, but I think we should give her the benefit of the doubt. For an advocate of the rhythm method, her other thought is remarkably sophisticated and. And she was obviously incredibly smart and So I think it's better to say no, she was probably doing something in different contexts here, rather than being inconsistent in a way that's easy for we four assholes to just shit all over.

1:31:12 Mark: Right. Actually, I was really impressed by her as not so much in the critical parts of modern moral philosophy where she's discounting Kant, et cetera, but in her positive arguments. I mean, this is a good example of what analytic philosophy should read like, it can compartmentalize in the way you're talking about and speak to different audiences in different essays because she kind of has a very limited, you know, this is my point in this essay. I'm going to just argue for this one point and that's it. And there's something very nice about that.

And then seeing in the book Intention, the way that she uses these analyses to build up over time, it's very different than reading Rawls or Kuhn and obviously owes a lot to Wittgenstein, but still strikes me as much more organized and intentional. Having a point is what I mean, than Wittgenstein's a little more exploratory take. In the investigations we've talked about how

1:32:03 Philosophy: like, these are three very different pieces that we've read. Two of them, so MMP and War and Murder, those seem to be in like different contexts. In Intention, she explicitly, she like, really avoids ethics. And so while she never does it for us, we've had a pretty easy time drawing a line through everything, connecting dots. And we've moved around a lot in part because, like, look at how relevant this all is. This is maybe a dotted outline, but there's a clear shape here.

1:32:29 Mark: I wanted to make sure we brought up some of the points earlier in War and Murder that we presented her already as an absolutist, you know, do not kill. But really it's, as has been clarified a couple times, it's do not kill the innocents. That that will be an unjust action, sort of whatever happens. But she takes a hardline stance in War and Murder right off the bat to argue against pacifism, to say that non Christians have this view of Christianity as just Jesus came and said we should turn the other cheek and love everyone and that's all we should do.

In which case there would not be justification for rulers of nations, for instance, to put down force with force or someone to have a just war, you know, that would beat back aggression or prevent somebody from committing genocide or horrible things like that. That she thinks absolutely that governments have the right or even people have the right to kill the non innocent. Although she then has a discussion of self defense that even right in the case that someone is trying to kill you, you don't then shoot to kill. You do like the least that you could do to prevent them but right.

1:33:36 Wes: The state though has a legitimate monopoly on force. Which is not to say there can't be such a thing as legitimate revolution. I think she hints at that. But. But for the sake of social order, force is required. Societies don't simply come together and work because everyone has great intentions, right?

1:33:55 Mark: And just because most rulers and governments have been bad because people are so messed up, doesn't mean that there's not a right involved such that if there is a just government, then it does have the right to use force in a just way. In the same way that just because most wars have not not in fact been just doesn't rule out the concept of just war. But the overall point she makes of this and this argument against pacifism is that it is dangerous to set up an ideal that is too high. That non Christians who then see the teachings of Jesus as very strict and basically that they're unworkable, so that they argue that you should never use violence ever, you should always turn the other cheek.

But since we can't do that, we might even acknowledge it, give it lip service. But since we can't do that, that then we end up saying okay, well I have to fight, so then anything goes to win. So having principles that are too high have the practical effect of driving people to mayhem, to having no values at all. That was a cool point.

1:34:58 Philosophy: I think that what she's speaking against in particular is a sort of looseness of thought. We're like oh, okay, this was easy up top where she certainly has principles that are absolute, like don't do unjust things, you can't do the disgusting thing that she never specifies that you would have to do to avoid going to prison. Well, don't do that. But I think she wants to apply those sorts of prohibitions at a much more specific level of individual actions. Rather than saying like oh no war for all time. Well that seems awfully broad. And if you're going to have a principle that strong, it should be more specific. We should be able to talk about what are the circumstances that make that unjust. Even things that end up being unjust are unjust in virtue of circumstances. And it's those circumstances that make them like forbidden.

1:35:48 Mark: So there we go. Aristotelian practical wisdom again needed. Which means you're not just Blamed for having bad intentions, you're blamed. If you're an idiot and you don't know you can't relate means to end. That's what practical wisdom is all about. That if you are judging poorly, then that is a moral failing. Can be anyway, right?

1:36:08 Philosophy: And that poor judgment that leads us to do things that are unjust and don't contribute to our flourishing. So it's this weird sort of. You also can't get out of this by remaining stupid, right? Which is like a really important point. You can't just, oh, I don't know, I'm just a simple gardener, I'm just pumping water. Like in that case, kind of. But there are other cases where like you can't play dumb, you don't get off the hook. So this sort of ignorance of the law or ignorance of virtue doesn't justify doing unvirtuous things where you should have known or this is discoverable and you're culpable for not knowing that. So that sort of playing dumb with respect to how your actions impact things, that in and of itself is a bad thing or is something you ought not to in the non moral sense of ought because it doesn't contribute to your flourishing to remain stupid.

1:36:57 Mark: So there's your argument against people. What's the use of philosophy? Why do I need to go through a Socratic process of self analysis?

1:37:05 Philosophy: Because you can't flourish, dickbag. That's. Yeah, because you're bad. That's a very brief gloss on it, but it's not that brief. That's pretty much the argument.

1:37:13 Mark: Any other points we missed or other closing thoughts?

1:37:17 Philosophy: There's a lot going on there. And for as long as we've been going on, we didn't really touch on brute facts. We didn't break down alternatives for other like moral systems to get out of her sort of objections. So even though, I mean this was much less reading than I know you guys typically do, but there's still a whole lot that hasn't been unpacked that we've moved through. And I think that speaks to her influence and the importance of her work is. I don't want to say she's painting with broad brushstrokes, but this essay covers a whole lot of territory and sometimes it does it very quickly. And I think that that's a lot of like Wes in particular seems to have a problem with that. But it's hard to understate like just how much she's getting done here or at least getting started.

1:38:04 Dylan: Unlike Mark, I didn't read the whole book of Intention, but I kind of wanted to read the whole thing.

1:38:08 Mark: It's good, but I'm glad that we're not doing it for an episode because like the philosophical investigations that we then expanded into two episodes and we'd still only gotten through a quarter of what we even read, let alone the rest of the book. That intention, like that, it just has a lot of different observations and analyses per page so that it would take a while to discuss it with any satisfaction.

1:38:34 Dylan: I think you make the mistake of assuming that just because you read the whole thing, you have to discuss the whole thing.

1:38:40 Mark: We must keep going to the fourth hour of the recording. We must get through the reading. We're not to the last pages left.

1:38:48 Dylan: You need to read an 800 page book and talk about it for two hours and that'd be the only time

1:38:52 Mark: to tell about it.

1:38:52 Wes: That's what we're going to do.

1:38:53 Mark: Coming up with David Brin.

1:38:56 Philosophy: Wait, what are you guys doing?

1:38:58 Mark: We're reading a sci fi novel by David Brin and having him the author on because it's a very philosophical novel. That's going to be a couple episodes from now.

1:39:08 Philosophy: Enjoy those 800 pages, guys. Enjoy those two hours of 800 pages.

1:39:13 Mark: Alrighty. Right. Next time we will read Bishop George Berkeley's Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous from 1713. We are supported by your donations. Go to partiallyexaminelife.com to make a contribution. Big donors since our last time have included Nikos Vasilakis, Jason Maddox, Thomas Michael, Jonas H. Tallboys, Nigel Smith, Jessica Luck, Zhao, Rui Wen, Catherine Milne, Joe Neild, David Menaris, Jimmy Miller, Jessica Wilkes, Cody Fong, Brent Dahlgren, Rebecca Hansen, Brad Velasquez, Marci Antonio, Terry Mordiarty, Bill Cromarty, Matt Myers, Chris Jarzbeck, Thomas Rennegan, Matthew Jones, James Schmaltz and Evan Holly and many others became partially Examined Life citizens at the $5 a month rate.

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1:40:27 Philosophy: It's been a while. I'm actually in the middle of revamping everything. I'm rebuilding the site from the ground up. I think you guys are really gonna like the new look I've also been working on a project for about the last year that I'm not ready to quite pull all the wraps off of, but I'll be circulating drafts of that actually in the Citizens Commons for discussion in the next couple months. I believe it's called.

1:40:48 Mark: Isn't it called Coitus Reservatus?

1:40:51 Philosophy: Coitus Reservatus, the Philosophy Bro Story. It's an autobiography told from the perspective of how my mother wishes things had gone. So things are picking up again shortly. I'm really excited about that. I interviewed with the British Journal of Undergraduate Philosophy for their March issue upcoming. So keep your eyes out for that.

1:41:15 Mark: Cool.

1:41:16 Philosophy: And you can follow me at philobro on Twitter for updates about those projects as they roll out.

1:41:23 Mark: Excellent.

1:41:24 Philosophy: Thanks for having me, you guys. This was fun.

1:41:26 Dylan: Thanks for coming on. It was good.

1:41:27 Philosophy: Yeah. My pleasure.

1:41:28 Mark: Good night, everybody.

1:41:29 Wes: Good night.

1:41:30 Dylan: Good night.

1:41:44 Mark: You want what you want and I want what I want. Your wants are your wants but I want your wants and it all adds up to nothing? All adds up to nothing. You need what you need and I need what you need? You want what you need But I need a kind of need that you wouldn't believe in if I spelled it out in blood? That you couldn't believe in if it caused a flood. Well, it all adds up to now nothing? It all adds up to nothing. And it all adds up to nothing. And it all adds up to nothing. What makes people cling together? What makes people sing together Is a whole lot of loneliness And I think of them we're born to this.

It takes different eyes to see that nothing makes us rise to be that whole. For yourself enough for yourself. Because it all adds up to nothing. It all adds up to nothing. Oh, it all adds up to nothing? All adds up to nothing. You want what you want and I want what I want? Your wants don't add up But I've got to just shut up? And it all adds up to nothing? All adds up to nothing? Nothing. And it all adds up to nothing? All adds up to nothing. Sam.