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)
