Anscombe's Virtues: Simply Wrong?

A spirited exchange is in progress in the Times Literary Supplement on the subject of Elizabeth Anscombe’s ethical theory.  It began September 30, with a review by Simon Blackburn (Cambridge, Philosophy) of Human Life, Action and Ethics: Essays by G. E. M. Anscombe, edited by Mary Geach and Luke Gormally.   The review’s title, “Simply Wrong,” was moderated to “Against Anscombe” on the front page.  Although Blackburn is mindful of Anscombe’s brilliance and fond of her truculence and “joyously abusive vocabulary,” he is unsparing in his account of her ethics–-an ethics, as he represents it, of uncharity.  “Her world was Manichean, and, like others in her Church, she was quick to diagnose any hint of dissent as a symptom of darkness and corruption, and therefore to be treated as enmity or heresy.”
    His focus is on the essay “Modern Moral Philosophy,” in which she called for a moratorium on the concepts of moral obligation and moral duty, which she claimed were harmful outside the context of belief in a divine lawgiver.  Blackburn: “Anscombe herself, of course, had no intention of jettisoning the concepts of moral obligation and duty, which are needed to frame her other principal claim, which is that certain things are forbidden, whatever the consequences.  There are things that the virtuous person simply will not contemplate....”  Moreover, her call for retiring the language of moral obligation “is poppycock.  I may choose to avoid the words, if I wish, but that is by itself of no interest, and if I feel I must avoid them because I have been told that they are the private preserve of people who believe in divine law, then I have been hoodwinked and robbed....if it looks like a moral demand behaves like a moral demand, and quacks like a moral demand, then that is what it is.”  But, silly as it is, the idea casts a sudden shadow, for Blackburn adds that “Anscombe’s claim is important, because people can come to live down to it...any idea of real wrongdoing is a ghost of its former self.”
    But what of Anscombe’s “morality of absolute prohibitions?”  Blackburn allows that “this has its strengths, and we have only to think of the grubby pragmatism of a Rumsfeld or a Blair in order to become aware of them, although in these papers Anscombe showed little interest in applying her doctrine to political rights.”  The papers in the volume focus on medical ethics, and advance a thesis of “right respect” for life, which is hospitable to capital punishment but not to  voluntary euthanasia.  Blackburn is evidently offended by Anscombe’s positions: “apparently fierce justice can trump, or perhaps nullify, respect for the dignity of life, but compassion cannot.  I could not discover why.”  Tending toward the conciliatory, he writes that “If we are appalled at some of the prohibitions she willingly embraces, then these essays may force us to ask ourselves why.”  But Blackburn concludes with a “parting kick”: “The index lists eleven pages for justice, and none at all for altruism, benevolence, charity, compassion, empathy, forgiveness, mercy, sympathy, or love.”

    The review prompted the following letter:

Oct. 7, 2005

Sir, – Simon Blackburn, in his review of a collection of papers by my mother, G.E.M. Anscombe (Sept.30), devotes some space to a critical account of her essay “Modern Moral Philosophy”, in which she enunciates the thesis that language about moral duty, morally wrong action, the moral ought, etc, is a survival from the Judaeo-Christian belief in a divinely given moral law.

    Blackburn calls this thesis “a version of the Dostoevskian claim that if God is dead everything is permitted”, and supposes her to be saying that “real morality comes only with the Judaeo-Christian law-based conception of ethics”.  This is a misunderstanding of her thesis.  Anscombe maintains that the class of actions which are illicit (ie, contrary to divine law) is the same class as the class of actions which are contrary to the virtues which one has to have in order to be a good human being.  She did not think one needed a divine law conception of ethics to know what a good human being was, or what virtues he had.  Aristotle did not speak of divine law, and she saw in him a figure to whom atheists (as well as Christians) could look as an example of how to think about vice and virtue.

    She thought that the notion of the “morally right” was harmful when cut off from its roots in divine law: obviously, one of the harms she had in mind was consequentialism, the view that there was no kind of action so bad but it might be rendered “morally right” by its foreseeable consequences.  She wanted people who did not believe in God to stop asking questions like “Is this morally right?”, and to start asking questions like “Is this gluttonous?” or “Is this that kind of injustice which is called murder?”.  She did not think that an atheist could have no desire to be a good man, or to act well, or that in him such a desire must be meaningless.  She was not attacking atheism as leading to libertinism.

    She was proposing, in an atheistic culture, a study of the psychology of the virtues with a view to finding a clear and non-theistic method by which one could come to see the objective truths of morality.

    Mary Geach

The following week saw another letter:

Oct. 14, 2205

Sir, –  [Simon] Blackburn reviews Human Life, Action and Ethics: Essays by G. E. M. Anscombe, edited by Mary Geach and Luke Gormally. This book ...contains as Chapter Twelve the text of a radio talk broadcast in 1957 and entitled “Does Oxford Moral Philosophy Corrupt Youth?”. In it Anscombe answers that, in order to be corrupted, one would have to have had better ideas without this influence, and continues, ironically, “Oxford moral philosophy is perfectly in tune with the highest and best ideals of the country at large . . . . [It] is conceived perfectly in the spirit of the time and might be called the philosophy of the flattery of that spirit”.

    The previous year Anscombe had tried, unsuccessfully and with almost no support from her philosopher colleagues (Philippa Foot was a notable exception), to reverse the decision of Oxford University to award an honorary degree to President Truman. Interestingly, in a review that is otherwise critical of her, Blackburn remarks upon the “strengths” of Anscombe’s “morality of absolute prohibitions”. One such is the prohibition on intentionally killing the innocent. That is what she believed Truman had done, and it was the unwillingness or inability of her fellow philosophers to condemn this action as murder that prompted the theme of the radio talk.

    John Haldane (St. Andrews, Philosophy)

Blackburn justified his parting shot with the observation that niceness would not "placate her embattled spirit" and--anyway--"perhaps the incivility of righteousness is catching."  It wasn't catching fast enough to deny Mr. Truman his degree.  (Thanks to Ophelia Benson for a link to Blackburn's full review)

Comments

[Mark van Roojen]

I have to say that my sympathies here are with Blackburn. "Modern Moral Philosophy," is great fun, but it is unfair to just about every position it criticizes. (I'm not a fan of Kant's, but a one line refutation? Or maybe it was a paragraph. In any case, even Kant deserves more than that.) And even if Anscombe's intended thesis was that either some sort of theistic ethics or virtue theory was needed to ground ethics (not just that theism was necessary) it seems that this claim is wrong. And it would be hard to find an actual argument for the view in the paper.

Anscombe is, however, to be recognized for her principled position with respect to Harry Truman. She rightly condemned his order to bomb two cities and the civilians therein to extract a surrender on favorable terms from a despotic power, even though the goals were laudable. If Blackburn is critical of that particular move of hers, he is wrong on that count. But that does not show that the rest of his criticisms are misplaced. The other things he is looking for in an ethical view seem worth having.

[john doris]

Like Mark, I find myself in some sympathy with Simon Blackburn. In "Modern Moral Philosophy," at least, Anscombe sometimes sometimes seems to mistake moral confidence for philosophical argument, as when she says (p. 42) of one who would entertain the (putatively) utilitarian response to "magistrate and mob" cases, “I do not want to argue with him; he shows a corrupt mind.” Interestingly, our prelinary research indicates that while American undergraduates share Anscombe's sentiments on this score, Chinese subjects are significantly more likely to allow the utilitarian expedient. Is Anscombe committed to thinking that such cultural difference (assuming it exists) should be attributed to cultural variation in the prevelance of "corrupt minds"?

--jmd

[Tom Hurka]

Like van Roojen and Doris, I'm with Simon Blackburn. The high regard in which some people hold "Modern Moral Philosophy" has always struck me as baffling. Three comments, though.

Mary Geach's letter proposes a novel interpretation of the first part of the article: Anscombe wasn't saying that talk of obligation apart from God is incoherent, just that it's dangerous because it leads to consequentialism. But why should anyone believe that? Prichard and Ross, to name two philosophers Anscombe should have known, talked of obligation apart from God but weren't remotely consequentialists. They didn't use the doctrine of double effect and weren't absolutists (more power to them on the second point) but surely none of that had anything to do with their use of the concept of obligation. It was just a substantive disagreement.

Mary Geach's interpretation of the article's positive proposal is more standard, but the proposal is surely hopeless. We're to identify which actions should be done by linking them to the virtues, and to identify the virtues as those traits without which a person can't flourish or live well. But this requires us to have a conception of human flourishing that is independent of claims about which acts are right or which states of affairs good but that nonetheless, magically, yields the conventional list of virtues, including courage, generosity, justice, etc. Isn't that just a pipe dream?

Finally, on "the grubby pragmatism of a Rumsfeld or a Blair," Anscombe famously said that the modern concept of aggression is a mistake: the question is not who struck the first blow, it is who is in the right. I suspect that she would have favoured war to remove Saddam years ago.

[Mark Murphy]

Two comments.

The two things folks seem to find irritating about “Modern Moral Philosophy” are (1) the dismissive quickness of the arguments regarding Kant, Mill, Butler, et al. and (2) the reliance on the view that some people are not worth arguing with because of their corrupt minds. Re (1): I surely would never argue that quickly; but I do take it that the claim that a position is so obviously wrongheaded that it can be dismissed in a line or two is itself a substantive philosophical view, one that can be responded to only by examining the philosophical power of the line or two that is offered in support of such a quick dismissal. (And all of you folks who have dismissed the tremendous variety of subtly formulated divine command conceptions of morality in a line or two stand up and be counted here.) Re (2): Most of us do believe that some opinions are signs of depravity, and indicate that there are better things to do than to argue with those that espouse them. (I’m not sure I see the interest of John Doris’s final remark. If undergraduate students in China are more likely to support judicial conviction of the innocent than American undergraduates are, then of course Anscombe would be happy to say that on that particular point Chinese moral culture is more depraved than U.S. moral culture — though surely there may be many points on which the tables are turned.)

I am not sure that we should be as sanguine as Blackburn seems to be about the prospects for moral obligation in the absence of a divine lawgiver. It is not so obvious that attempts to provide an analysis of obligation in terms of reasons, whether simply in terms of the weight of the reasons, or in terms of a particular structure (protected reasons, or the like), succeed. Nor does it seem likely that we can analyze obligation in terms of, say, what the virtuous person would never do because of the virtuous person’s distinctive motivational possibilities. Adams argues with some plausibility in Finite and Infinite Goods that obligation is analytically a matter of social requirement, and the only sort of social requirement that could also satisfy the platitudes about the universal character of morality would be those imposed by a divine lawgiver. Of course Blackburn is right that if it quacks like a moral demand, then it’s a moral demand. But nothing sounds more like a demand than, well, a real live demand, from a real live demander.

[john doris]

Thanks to Mark Murphy for the clarification:

". . . of course Anscombe would be happy to say that on that particular point Chinese moral culture is more depraved than U.S. moral culture."

If Anscombe was here willing to dismiss intercultural evaluative diversity without argument, as she appeared willing to do for disagreement within the confines of Analytic philosophy, this certainly exacerbates the appearance of moral vanity that Blackburn and others find objectionable.

[Matthew O'Brien]

A brief point about Tom Hurka's doubts about virtue theory.

He says that in order to specify good actions (and their corresponding dispositions of character) we must first "have a conception of human flourishing that is independent of claims about which acts are right or which states of affairs good but that nonetheless, magically, yields the conventional list of virtues, including courage, generosity, justice, etc."

Why should this demand have to be met? McDowell, Hursthouse, and Foot have argued that we shouldn't expect it to be. There is no value-neutral conception of human nature and flourishing since goodness is as much a part of the natural world as anything else. That goodness isn't a feature of the world registered by the methods of certain empirical sciences doesn't show that it's unreal.

I take it that something like this view lies behind Anscombe's remark about corrupt minds. Not recognizing that certain actions are unjust is a cognitive failure in a similar way that not seeing that snow is white is a cognitive failure. You can't argue someone out of a such a failure in either case.

Of course all this relies on some controversial metaphysics, but ultimately any ethical theory does this. Given that some rather fantastic metaphysical views are taken seriously by philosophers (e.g. Lewis' modal realism), the possibility of natural goodness shouldn't be ruled without serious consideration either.

[john doris]

"Not recognizing that certain actions are unjust is a cognitive failure in a similar way that not seeing that snow is white is a cognitive failure."

Matthew: Was Anscombe's assertion that endorsing (or considering!) the (putative) utilitarian expedient in the "magistrate and mob" case amounts to a "cognitive failure"? If so, we're owed an account of "cognitive failure" that doesn't simply beg the question against those committed to an ethical theory or outlook that Anscombe rejects.

[Ophelia Benson]

By the way, the review itself is available on Blackburn's site.

http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/~swb24/reviews/Anscombe.htm

[Eric Rovie]

I always thought the most interesting and important part of Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy" wasn't the alleged 'return to the virtues', but the claim that ethics, done properly, needs to be based on a reasonable philosophy of psychology which, for Anscombe, was sorely lacking circa 1958. Maybe that's Mary Geach's point in her reply to Blackburn, although I think people over-emphasize the virtues and under-emphasize the psychological aspect of her project. For my money, though, I'm not sure Mary Geach is entirely right...although she might have been aiming for a "clear and non-theistic method," I find it hard, at times, to distinguish Anscombe's religious dogmatism (her acceptance of double effect, for example) from her 'non-theistic' ethics.

[Jimmy Doyle]

John Doris wrote, “Anscombe sometimes seems to mistake moral confidence for philosophical argument, as when she says (p. 42) of one who would entertain the (putatively) utilitarian response to ‘magistrate and mob’ cases, ‘I do not want to argue with him; he shows a corrupt mind.’” But how can an explicit refusal, on the basis of moral confidence, to argue with an allegedly corrupt opponent count as “mistaking moral confidence for philosophical argument"? On the contrary, Anscombe would have to be fully aware of the distinction to maintain that a certain kind of moral confidence makes philosophical argument irrelevant. Philosophers tend to assume that giving a philosophical argument is the only legitimate way to get someone to change their view. But this isn’t true.

“[O]ur prelinary research indicates that while American undergraduates share Anscombe's sentiments on this score, Chinese subjects are significantly more likely to allow the utilitarian expedient,” he went on. “Is Anscombe committed to thinking that such cultural difference (assuming it exists) should be attributed to cultural variation in the prevelance of ‘corrupt minds’?” Apparently in the late 1930’s there was a similar disparity between Americans’ views on the extermination of Jews and those prevalent in Germany. Is this also a case of ‘intercultural evaluative diversity,’ which ought not to be ‘dismissed without argument’? Obviously cultures, like individuals, can become corrupted in all sorts of ways, as the recent history of China shows. To attribute all such corruption to the antecedent existence of ‘corrupt minds’ within it is just an unwarranted piece of simple-mindedness designed to make Anscombe look sinister in the light of received ideas.

Blackburn’s ascription of the “Dostoievskian thesis” to Anscombe is an objective howler that shows he doesn’t really understand some of the main claims of “Modern Moral Philosophy.” Yet Tom Hurka’s beef is with Mary Geach’s correction:

“Mary Geach's letter proposes a novel interpretation of the first part of the article: Anscombe wasn't saying that talk of obligation apart from God is incoherent, just that it's dangerous because it leads to consequentialism. But why should anyone believe that?”

But Anscombe’s view, correctly if imprecisely reported by Geach, is not the absurd one that a non-theistic law conception of ethics leads necessarily to consequentialism, and so she cannot be refuted merely by pointing to non-consequentialist non-theistic advocates of a law conception. That Hurka attributes such a view to Anscombe goes some way toward explaining his “bafflement” at the high regard in which the paper has been held by some. (In any case, Hurka may well be wrong about Prichard and Ross; they may well count as “consequentialist” on Anscombe’s definition, because she seems to count any non-absolutist as a consequentialist. One can hardly complain that this is an eccentric conception of consequentialism. Anscombe invented the term.)

The correct statement of the view of Anscombe’s that Hurka mis-states is that a non-theistic law conception is hospitable to consequentialism in the sense that it makes it possible. “But why should anyone believe that?” Well, one reason someone might believe that would be Anscombe’s reason, which Hurka doesn’t mention, even though Geach effectively restated it. The Hebrew-Christian law conception is of course strongly deontological or “absolutist.” But – and this is less often realized – so is the Aristotelian virtue conception: not through-and-through, but insofar as certain aspects of the virtue of justice can only be understood in deontological terms. So within those ethical conceptions it is conceptually impossible to suggest that (eg) killing an innocent man to placate the mob could be “morally right” (Hebrew-Christian) or could be just (virtue); such a killing is a paradigm case of the sort deployed in teaching the meanings of "morally wrong" and "unjust." But once the law conception adopts a notion of “morally right” that has no conceptual ties to the deontologically-structured pronouncements of the Jews’ and Christians’ God, it becomes conceptually possible to suggest precisely that such an action may be morally right, because justified by its consequences. Anscombe therefore advocates a return to the virtue conception because its account of justice represents the only secular bulwark against consequentialism.

Eric Rovie: Acceptance of the doctrine of double effect is not a sign of “religious dogmatism.” Debates among moral philosophers on the doctrine do not turn on any religious questions; it is usually discussed in entirely secular terms (as by eg Alan Donagan and Warren Quinn). Something like the doctrine is required by any deontological ethical conception that wishes to avoid quietist pacifism.

[Eric Rovie]

Jimmy,

Fair point. I didn't mean to imply that one MUST be a religious dogmatist to accept double effect, only that Anscombe's acceptance of it smacks of such a view, at least up until her "Medalist's Address" where she seems to change course slightly.

[Brad Cokelet]

On reading Jimmy Doyle's comment that Prichard and Ross "may well be consequentialists" according to Anscombe's usage of that term, I am reminded of Cora Diamond's argument to that effect. She defends that claim on the way to arguing that Mill (!) can be interpreted as a non-consequentialist (again, according to Ansombe's usage.)

Reference: "Consequentialism in Modern Moral Philosophy and in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'" (in "Human Lives: Critical Essays on Consequentialist Bioethics", Oderberg, David S (ed))

[Jimmy Doyle]

To repeat: "Anscombe's usage" of the term has a certain authority, deriving from the fact that she coined it. The litmus test is whether the philosopher in question thinks there are any descriptions such that the actions that fall under them count as impermissible whatever the consequences. Given Ross's denial that any duties can be more than prima facie, there is a prima facie case for categorising him as a consequentialist; conversely, much of what Mill says in On Liberty seems to let him off the hook. So Cora may well be right on both counts.