Draft of 3-11-13
PHIL 202: Core Ethics; Winter 2013 Core Sequence in the History of Ethics, 2011-2013 IV: 19th and 20th Century Moral Philosophy David O. Brink Handout #12: Elizabeth Anscombe on Modern Moral Philosophy
If the emotivists represent one kind of critical reaction to the British school, Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001) represents a very different kind of critical reaction. In fact, she lumps noncognitivists, such as R.M. Hare and Patrick Nowell-Smith, together with the rational intuitionists of the British school. She combines several distinct concerns about this larger tradition.
1. She is critical of the British school’s focus on duty and obligation. 2. She thinks that the school has a consequentialist conception of duty that is wrong- headed. 3. She thinks that an ethics of obligation only makes sense in a theological world-view committed to divine commands, with the result that the focus on duty and obligation no longer makes sense in a secular age. 4. She advocates a turn from duty and obligation to a eudaimonistic ethics that gives a central role to human flourishing and virtue. 5. Perhaps less clearly, she is critical of the school for its relentless abstraction, its willingness to prescind from substantive moral commitments.
I make no attempt here to discuss or assess Anscombe’s larger contributions to philosophy or even moral philosophy, which would need to focus on her discussion of intentional action in Intention (1957) and her discussion of Catholic moral doctrines, such as the doctrine of double effect (discussed, for instance, in “War and Murder” and “Mr. Truman’s Degree”). Instead, I will focus on her provocative and influential discussion in “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958). It can be surprising how influential this article has been, given its impatient, uncharitable, and contemptuous attitude toward the history of ethics and the British school. Though written in a style not be imitated, it raises some issues worth our attention.
MODERN MORAL PHILOSOPHY At the outset of the paper, Anscombe lists three main theses that she will defend (26).
1. It is not profitable to do moral philosophy without an adequate moral psychology, which we currently lack (but apparently is not unattainable). 2. The concepts of duty and obligation are relics of a theological world-view that is no longer accepted and so should be discarded. 3. The differences among members of the British school are less important than what unites them, and its common commitments, especially to duty and consequentialism, should be rejected.
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These three theses are connected. In some ways, (2) appears to be philosophically basic. She argues that the focus on duty and obligation no longer makes sense in a secular world- view, which explains at least one of the primary mistakes of the British school and, hence, (3). This attack on duty and obligation is supposed to recommend a refocusing on human flourishing and virtue. However, this recommendation carries with it some skepticism, inasmuch as she seems to think that reconstructing a eudaimonist form of virtue ethics requires an adequate moral psychology, which she seems to think has not yet been developed.
THE CRITIQUE OF DUTY AND OBLIGATION The outlines of Anscombe’s attack on duty and obligation are reasonably clear (27, 30-31). She thinks that an ethics of obligation only makes sense in a theological world- view committed to divine commands, with the result that the focus on duty and obligation no longer makes sense in a secular age. The argument seems to have roughly this kind of structure.
1. Duty or obligation only makes sense as the product of a moral law. 2. Law implies legislation. 3. Legislation implies the existence of a superior law-giver. 4. Hence, duty or obligation only makes sense on a divine command theory of ethics. 5. Hence, duty or obligation makes no sense in a secular age.
There are several potential problems with this argument. It’s hard to know how to assess (1) without knowing more about what is built into the idea of a moral law, some of which emerges later in the argument. On a minimal reading, which will make later premises more substantial claims, (1) says only that moral duty or obligation is the result of moral generalizations, or rules, or principles. Even this claim might not be completely trivial, as it does seem to rule out certain forms of moral particularism, which would deny the existence or importance of general moral claims. But all members of the British school appear to be moral generalists in this sense, even Prichard who seemed closest to particularism. But, understood in this minimal way, (1) is reasonably ecumenical. But if the moral law referred to in (1) requires no more than moral rule, principle, or generalization, then (2) looks quite problematic. Why should moral principles presuppose legislation? Indeed, this would seem to imply a conventionalist view of morality that most, especially the rational intuitionists, should want to reject. Even if we wanted to invest the idea of moral law with more nomic significance, it’s unclear why we shouldn’t treat moral laws as natural laws, which are not conventional and do not require a law-maker. (2) itself seems to imply the existence of law-makers, without which legislation would apparently be impossible. But (3) introduces the further idea that a law-maker must be superior to those obligated by the laws. And this might seem to rule out self-legislation, which Anscombe associates with Kant and treats as absurd (27). But the possibility of democratic legal systems should already suggest that legislation is possible without political superiors in systems involving collective self-legislation. One form of mutual self- legislation that we are familiar with is the idea of contract. Anscombe suggests that this is an interesting but underdeveloped alternative (37-38). But the idea of morality as a 3 contract for mutual advantage has a long history, beginning in Plato’s discussion in Republic II and running through Epicurus and Hobbes. (4) is supposed to follow from what went before, and we have seen reasons one might want to resist each previous stage in the argument. But (4) is also ambiguous depending on how we understand the divine command theory. On one reading, divine command theory asserts only the biconditional relationship between divine command and duty.
X is one’s duty iff God does or would approve of x.
But we know from Plato’s Euthyphro that this biconditional claim is ambiguous between voluntarist and naturalist readings.
Voluntarism: X is one’s duty because God does or would approve of it.
Naturalism: God does or would approve of X because it is one’s duty, and God is or would be omniscient and morally perfect.
Only if (4) is understood as voluntarism will (5) follow from (4), but it’s not clear that (4) follows from the previous claims if (4) is understood as voluntarism. More generally, we could admit that moral duty or obligation implies the truth of naturalism. But if we are naturalists, we do not think that moral facts depend upon God’s will metaphysically or constitutively. So secularism would not rob duty and obligation of a metaphysical foundation. There is something slightly odd about Anscombe’s attempt to show that duty makes no sense in a secular age and that we should consequently turn our attention away from duty toward an ethics of flourishing and virtue inasmuch as Anscombe herself is an orthodox Catholic, who treats many moral doctrines of the Catholic church, such as the doctrine of double effect, as sacred moral commitments. One would more readily have expected the criticism of duty and obligation to come from someone who embraced a secular world-view. This is not Anscombe. I suppose she can think that secularists are wrong to embrace an ethics of duty and obligation, even if she would be entitled to do so. On this reading, her complaint about the ethics of duty is ad hominem: it makes no sense for secularists. Of course, our analysis of her argument suggests that she has not succeeded in giving secularists reason to abandon duty and obligation.
THE CRITIQUE OF CONSEQUENTIALISM Anscombe’s metaethical critique of an ethics of duty and obligation sits uneasily with her substantive criticism of the consequentialist conception of duty that she finds in the British school. Broadly speaking, she criticizes the British school for having an insufficiently categorical conception of duties not to harm the innocent (34). This is a somewhat surprising criticism from someone who thinks an ethics of duty should be abandoned. Anscombe introduces the term consequentialism (36) and treats the British school as monolithically consequentialist. This is a plausible reading of Sidgwick and Moore, but a very surprising reading of Ross and Prichard. 4
She correctly notes that Sidgwick elides the distinction between intended and foreseen consequences (34-35; cf. ME 202), which will seem a big mistake to anyone who accepts the doctrine of double effect, as she does, claiming that it is morally worse to intend harm than merely to foresee it. But it’s not clear why this elision should be a part of any consequentialist doctrine (36), certainly it’s not clear why a form of ideal consequentialism could not embrace the doctrine of double effect. It’s surprising that she should think that the British school should be committed to consequentialism as such. Ross would seem to be a clear counterexample. Anscombe’s reason for treating Ross as a consequentialist is that he allows that there might be some sufficiently great good to secure or harm to avoid that would justify breaking deontological prohibitions. That means that she thinks that moderate deontology is not real deontology and that the only real kind of deontology is one that treats moral duties as absolute side constraints on action.1 But that’s a surprising claim. Many find immoderate deontology an unattractive moral doctrine. Moreover, the moderate deontologist does recognize duties that are out of proportion to their impersonal value, which suggests that it too is an anti- consequentialist doctrine.
VIRTUE Anscombe thinks that we should eschew duty and obligation, which she thinks have no place in a secular world-view, and that we should return to an ethics of virtue (38). We have already expressed skepticism about the former claim. Now let’s consider the latter claim. It certainly seems possible to construct ideas of admirable character and virtue outside the context of law. Sometimes, Anscombe seems to think that deontic notions of duty, ought, obligation, and wrong are too thin or abstract and she seems to prefer thicker notions such as that which is unchaste, deceitful, or unjust (29-33). Later writing on thick and thin ethical concepts sees thick concepts as having determinate descriptive content that fixes normative evaluation. For instance, honesty has fixed descriptive content and is also a virtue. Anscombe suggests something similar by an indirect route. She insists that virtue should be linked, as it was for the ancients, with a notion of human flourishing (41). On one version of this view, virtues are character traits that contribute causally or constitutively to the agent’s flourishing. Anscombe seems to think that when ethics shifts from the thin notion of duty to a thicker notion of virtue and admirable traits that are grounded in human flourishing, we can answer Hume’s worry about the logical gap between
I should judge that Hume and our present-day ethicists have done a considerable service by showing that no content could be found in the notin of “morally ought”; if it were not that the latter philosophers try to find an alternative (very fishy) content and to retain the psychological force of the term. It would be most reasonable to
1 Even Nozick, who accepts a side constraint deontological moral theory, does not endorse absolute moral constraints. See Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 30n. 5
drop it. It has no reasonable sense outside a law conception of ethics; they are not going to maintain such a conception; and you can do ethics without it, as shown by the example of Aristotle [32-33].
For example, being dishonest in certain ways just is to be deceitful, which is vicious. This is an idea that both Foot and Williams will develop.2 I don’t think that we avoid the is/ought issue by switching our moral currency from duty to virtue. There is still the question whether telling the truth is always desirable -- for instance, when it causes avoidable and unconstructive suffering to a friend -- and this question does not go away if we frame it in terms of the demands of virtue, rather than duty. So I very much doubt that an ethics of virtue is preferable because it promises to allow us to infer an
DUTY AND INTENTION Recognizing that we don’t seem to avoid hard moral questions by switching from duty to virtue and that Anscombe herself has an extremely stringent conception of duty, we
2 See Philippa Foot, “Moral Beliefs” and “Goodness and Choice” in Virtues and Vices (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), developed more fully in her Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), and Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980). 3 See Gary Watson, “On the Primacy of Character” in Identity, Character, and Morality, ed. Flanagan and Rorty (MIT, 1990). 6 might wonder whether her polemic is really with an ethics of duty or whether it is with an ethics of duty purged of intentional concepts. We saw that she complains that Sidgwick elides the distinction between intended and foreseen effects, central to the doctrine of double effect, which she accepts. She wrongly thinks that this is a feature of consequentialism, as such, and she wrongly thinks that all members of the British school are consequentialists. But it’s not clear that other consequentialists in the tradition do assign intrinsic significance to the difference between intending and merely foreseeing harm, and, though Ross is not a consequentialist, he too thinks that duty concerns only actions and not motives (R&G 4-6). Perhaps Anscombe need not reject an ethics of duty if it is sensitive, as she thinks existing conceptions are not, to issues in moral psychology about the nature of various mental states, including intention, desire, and pleasure. In seeking to account for norms outside of a law conception of ethics, she looks to virtue (38). This would be a plea for the moral relevance of the sort of work she undertakes in her book Intention. This would make her real agenda less radical than she presents it and would not see her as making a case for a virtue-theoretic conception of ethics. This is perhaps a somewhat revisionary and deflationary reading of Anscombe, but it has the virtue of making her main thesis more plausible.