Elizabeth Anscombe: Philosophy, Quotes & Legacy

Biography

Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe was born on March 18, 1919, in Limerick, Ireland, and educated at Oxford, where she became a pupil and later a colleague of Wittgenstein. She was one of the most formidable philosophers of the twentieth century: a brilliant logician, a fierce Catholic, and the translator and literary executor of Wittgenstein's later works, including the Philosophical Investigations. She taught at Oxford for most of her career, holding the chair of philosophy at Cambridge from 1970 to 1986. She was also a public moralist: in 1956 she protested the conferral of an honorary degree on President Harry Truman, arguing that Truman was a mass murderer for authorizing the atomic bombings — the protest was a concrete application of her conviction that the moral life cannot be separated from the moral judgments of the public world. She died on January 5, 2001, in Cambridge.

Historical Context

Anscombe worked at the intersection of three currents: the analytic philosophy of Wittgenstein, the Catholic moral tradition, and the moral philosophy of the Anglo-American world. Her most famous work, the essay "Modern Moral Philosophy" (1958), is the founding document of the modern revival of virtue ethics. The essay made three claims that changed the course of ethics: first, that the moral terms of the modern tradition — "ought," "right," "wrong" — are the survivors of an abandoned law-conception of ethics, terms that have lost their meaning when the divine lawgiver is no longer believed in; second, that the philosophy of psychology is the foundation of ethics — the concepts of intention, desire, and character must be analyzed before the ethics can proceed; third, that the tradition's neglect of the concept of virtue is a mistake — the moral life should be understood in terms of the virtues and the vices, as Aristotle understood it, not in terms of the rules and the calculations that the modern theories had substituted.

Core Ideas

The "Ought" Without the Law

Anscombe's most provocative claim in "Modern Moral Philosophy" is that the modern moral "ought" is a ghost: the concept of moral obligation was formed within the divine-law conception of ethics, and when the belief in the divine lawgiver disappeared, the concept lost its ground. The modern secular ethics that continued to use "ought" and "obligation" were, in her phrase, using a term that "is only a remnant, or else a corruption" — a survival without its rationale. The consequence is not nihilism but reorientation: the moral life should be understood not through the law and the obligation but through the virtues and the character, in the manner of Aristotle. The essay's diagnosis is the starting point of the virtue-ethics revival.

Intention

Anscombe's other great work is Intention (1957), a short book that Philippa Foot described as "the most important treatment of action since Aristotle." The book analyzes the concept of intention — the distinction between what we intend and what we merely foresee — and its account became the foundation of the twentieth-century philosophy of action. The analysis is directly relevant to ethics: the doctrine of double effect, the distinction between killing and letting die, the responsibility for the foreseen consequences — all rest on the account of intention that Anscombe provided. Her analysis of practical knowledge — the knowledge the agent has of what they are doing, not by observation but by being the agent — is one of the most influential ideas in the philosophy of action.

The Revival of Virtue Ethics

The third contribution is the programmatic claim that the ethics of the future must recover the concept of virtue. Anscombe argued that the moral philosophy of the modern period had narrowed the moral life to the rules and the calculations — the deontological rules and the consequentialist calculations — and that the recovery of the virtues, the character traits of wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance, was the task of the new ethics. The essay inspired the revival: Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981) is the most famous descendant of her program, and the virtue ethics of Foot, Williams, and Nussbaum grew from the ground she cleared.

Philosophy

Anscombe's philosophy is the marriage of the analytic rigor of Wittgenstein and the moral seriousness of the Catholic tradition. Her style is the style of the analytic philosopher — the precision, the argument, the refusal of the rhetorical — applied to the questions that the tradition had treated with the rhetoric: the nature of intention, the ground of the moral life, the reality of the virtues. Her deepest conviction is that the moral life is real — that the judgments of good and evil, right and wrong, are not the projections of the emotions or the conventions of the culture but the judgments of the reason about the reality of the human good. The philosophy is demanding: it refuses both the consequentialist arithmetic and the deontological formalism, and it insists that the moral life is the life of the whole person — the intentions, the desires, the character — lived in the light of the virtues.

Major Works

Anscombe's most famous works are Intention (1957), the short book that founded the modern philosophy of action; "Modern Moral Philosophy" (1958), the essay that revived virtue ethics; and her collections of papers, including Ethics, Religion and Politics and Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind. Her translation of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (1953) brought the later philosophy of her teacher to the English-speaking world, and her editions of his Zettel and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics preserved works that would otherwise have been lost.

Famous Quotes

Anscombe's most quoted lines are from "Modern Moral Philosophy": "It is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology." Her diagnosis of the moral "ought": "The concepts of obligation, and duty — moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say — and of what is morally right and wrong... are survivals, or derivatives from survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives." And her account of the virtues: "It is a defect of our moral vocabulary that we have no word for the general character trait of which the virtues are the specification."

Related Thinkers

Anscombe is the pivot of the modern revival of virtue ethics. Her essay inspired Alasdair MacIntyre, whose After Virtue developed her diagnosis into a full account of the tradition of the virtues; Philippa Foot, her friend and colleague, developed the naturalistic virtue ethics; and Bernard Williams shared her suspicion of the systematic moral theories. Her debt to Wittgenstein is fundamental: the analytic method, the attention to the concepts, the refusal of the system — all are the inheritance of her teacher.

Sources

• Anscombe, G.E.M. Intention. Oxford: Blackwell, 1957.
• Anscombe, G.E.M. "Modern Moral Philosophy." Philosophy 33 (1958): 1-19.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "G.E.M. Anscombe" (plato.stanford.edu/entries/anscombe)