Critical Commentary: G. E. M. Anscombe, "Modern Moral Philosophy"

C​RITICAL​ C​OMMENTARY​: G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy” by David Dennen first posted 5 October 2020 This essay, published in 1958, is one people either love or hate. So I’ll put my cards on the table. I am not a fan. Much has been said about this essay over the years. Probably too much. It is hardly even possible at this point to summarize all the previous commentary on it. But I’ll try to bring out some issues that I think are not emphasized enough. My first problem with the essay is its title. Properly, the title should be “Modern English Moral Philosophy.” Or perhaps substitute “British” for “English.” From the content of her essay, it’s clear that Anscombe is really talking about a narrow tradition of philosophy. And, indeed, midway in the essay she does refer to “modern English moral philosophy” (9). This in itself is perfectly okay. There is no reason why someone should not write an essay about modern English moral philosophy. The problem is that the essay is often read as if it applies to modern moral philosophy ​in general​, and Anscombe’s language sometimes encourages this. But of all the names dropped in the essay, the only two which hail from beyond the British Isles are those of Aristotle and Kant. But let’s move on to more important matters. 1 Anscombe’s essay has three theses, laid out clearly on page one. These are well known to specialists, but I’ll repeat them here for convenience: 1. “[I]t is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy”; moral philosophy “should be laid aside … until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking.” 2. “[T]he concepts of obligation, and duty––​moral obligation and ​moral duty, that is to say––and of what is m ​ orally right and wrong, and of the m ​ oral sense of ‘ought,’ ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; because they are survivals, or derivatives from survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives, and are only harmful without it.” 3. “[T]he differences between the well-known English writers on moral philosophy from Sidgwick to the present day are of little importance” (because they are all “consequentialists”). I’ll take these theses in order. My criticism of the first is minor. The second two theses get more substantial treatment. Thesis 1 Regarding an “adequate” philosophy of psychology, Anscombe argues that to do ethics we first need an account of such things as “action,” “intention,” “pleasure,” “wanting” and their connection with “virtue,” whatever ​that turns out to be (5, 15). These terms are matters of psychology, or philosophical 2 psychology, which “we” now lack. I happen to agree that work in ethics must be based on a theory of human behavior (what we might call “psychology”). Whether the English lacked such a thing at the time I don’t know for sure (some have claimed to find it in J. S. Mill). But if Anscombe felt such a lack, there was nothing stopping her from adopting or adapting or improving on one of the highly developed psychologies of Germany or the United States (or perhaps elsewhere, though I’m foggier on what was going on in other countries). The German, or German-Austrian, tradition is less to my taste, and I won’t try to defend it here. But in the United States there was an important philosophical psychology in the work of William James, and an even better one in the work of George Herbert Mead and John Dewey. Elijah Jordan’s comprehensive (as far as these things go) work of moral psychology, T ​ he Good Life​, was published in 1949. Behaviorism had reached a high level of sophistication by the time of B. F. Skinner’s ​Science and Human Behavior in 1953; many of the moral-psychological implications of this method were also explored in his W ​ alden Two​ (1948). But, well, perhaps Anscombe was merely trying to hype her own contribution to this area. Her book ​Intention​, on the philosophy of action, had been published in 1957. I suppose it is doubtful that Anscombe would have seen German or American psychologies as “adequate.” After all, one man’s “adequate” is another woman’s “not good enough.” Still, let us take her comment about philosophical psychology with a grain of salt. 3 Thesis 2 Anscombe’s second argument is that we should, if “psychologically possible,” do away with the concept of obligation in a ​moral sense. Often her objection seems to be over the addition of the word “moral” or “morally” to common words like “obligation,” “ought,” “should,” “bad,” “good,” etc. Why? Moral philosophy is filled with deliberation over, and prescriptions for, what one ​ought to do or ​ought not to do to be a good, moral person. This is the field of what is now called deontology. Anscombe calls it a “law conception of ethics” (6). To her, deontology only makes sense in a religious society, where there is a “divine law giver.” If I tell you, in such a society, that you ought to pay back your loan, there may be the implication that, hey, God is watching, you better do it or prepare to suffer damnation. To use C. West Churchman’s useful term, God is the supposed “guarantor” of the system, the ultimate judge, jury, and executioner backing up our obligations to each other. The modern legal system takes over from God in some respects. If you take out a loan from an official organization, such as the government or a bank, you have, at least, a l​ egal obligation to pay it back. In areas that the law doesn’t touch, or where the law is fuzzy, we sometimes talk about ​moral obligation instead (I will complicate this distinction in a moment). If you, as my friend, loan me $500 to help me pay my rent, my obligation to pay you back may be only ​moral​, not legal. Anscombe would object to this formulation. She does not think that, in a secular society, there is any way to get from the statement that I ​owe you money to the statement that I have a ​moral obligation to pay you back. She thinks that the use of concepts like 4 “moral obligation” in a secular society are slights-of-hand. They are attempts to compensate, by “mere mesmeric force” (8), for a missing law-giver or system-guarantor. In this situation, to say that an obligation is “moral” is an ultimately toothless (and groundless) assertion. Anscombe suggests that to an act of broken obligation we should apply a more narrow descriptor such as “untruthful,” “unjust,” or “unchaste,” rather than “morally wrong” (9). “Morally wrong” is superfluous, contentless. She considers at length various arguments and counter-arguments, which I will not try to summarize. It’s worth pointing out, as other critics have, that Anscombe is in good company here, as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche criticized secular “ethics in an imperative form” in an almost identical way.​1 There has been some debate over Anscombe’s views on divine law ethics (she was, notably, a devout Catholic). But divine law ethics have much less going for them than might at first appear to be the case. Anscombe writes that divine law obliges us “as rules oblige in a game” (18). Perhaps, but this only makes sense if we believe we are all playing the same game and all agree to the rules. The history of Christianity does not show this kind of unity. Nietzsche, in his own onslaught against English moral philosophy, asserted, Christianity is a system, a carefully considered, ​integrated view of things. If you break off a main tenet, the belief in God, you smash the whole system along with it …. Christian morality is a The phrase is Schopenhauer’s. See Nietzsche’s T ​ wilight of the Idols​, 193–94 and Schopenhauer’s “prize essay on the basis of moral” in T ​ he Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics​ (especially 127–29). 1 5 command; it has a transcendent origin; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God is the truth,—it stands or falls along with belief in God. (194) One can imagine Anscombe nodding in assent. But Christianity can hardly be considered a “carefully considered, integrated​” system of thought—or as Anscombe might put it, a single game with a clear set of rules. First of all, which Christianity are we talking about: Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, Lutheranism, Calvinism, Anglicanism, Anabaptism, one of the many Evangelicalisms …? And what exactly are the “commands” of Christian morality, and how many are there? Wherein lies the force of these commands? What exactly is “God,” and what is the precise nature of His (Her? Its?) role in this world? What constitutes belief in God? There are certainly more than one, and sometimes countless, conflicting answers to these questions within “Christianity.” Integrated system my foot! Divine law ethics is no more coherent or forceful than secular law ethics. “Thou shalt not kill” may have stopped some Jews and Christians from murdering each other, but it clearly did not stop everyone. Whatever force divine law does have is necessarily mediated through social institutions populated by fellow human believers. In this way, divine laws are no different than secular laws and norms: they are things you ought or ought not to do if you want to be a member of a particular society, and they are ultimately backed up by sanctions provided by that society’s social institutions. The “ground” of morality in both religious and secular societies is the same—namely, social institutions. Only the mode of explaining this ground is different. 6 And, as I already pointed out, religious explanations have been highly unstable, just as secular explanations are unstable. So does the concept of “moral obligation” have any content in a secular society? I’ll need to return to my distinction between legal and ​moral​. The word “moral” is useful because life is messy. There are illegal activities and some of these are also said to be immoral, but some are not; then there are immoral activities and some of these are legal and some are not. And then there are things you o​ ught to do and things that you m ​ orally ought to do and things that you l​ egally ought to do. Well, no one said life was going to be simple. I cannot (or at least do not want to) cover the whole range of possibilities here. But I’ll give a few examples to make things clearer. In the United States you are legally obligated to pay your taxes. However, if you are a libertarian you may feel justified in ​not paying your taxes. Indeed, you may feel that the uses to which your tax money would be put are so bad as to be i​ mmoral​. Though you have a l​ egal obligation to pay your taxes, you may feel you have a m ​ oral obligation to ​not pay your taxes. And you may be socially rewarded for following through on this moral obligation by your fellow libertarians. But what does it mean here for some course of action to be “moral” or “immoral.” People generally recognize a continuum between things that they are obliged to do and things that they are morally obliged to do (i.e., that they ​really should do). If I tell my child, “You ​must finish all the food on your plate,” I am putting him under an obligation. But is it a ​moral obligation? I would not be inclined to say so. I may be annoyed if he doesn’t finish all his food, 7 but I would not wish to ​condemn him over it; I won’t necessarily think he’s a bad person.​2 Now, if my child and I make an agreement that he has to finish all his dinner if he wants dessert, and he doesn’t finish all his dinner but sneaks dessert anyway, we’re edging closer to a feeling of m ​ oral​ disapprobation on my part. If we call such a behavior (sneaking dessert) “immoral” rather than just “deceitful,” we are making a predictive generalization: If he breaks his obligation in this situation, he is likely to break his obligation in other, different situations. It does not surprise us if a murderer is also a thief and a liar. As a general observation, I suggest that we tend to speak of ​moral obligation when a person’s breaking of an obligation would lead us to be highly suspicious of them in the future in a variety of situations. Such a person becomes “immoral,” a “bad” person. There are other shades of meaning to these concepts, but my point is that they are not contentless holdovers—zombie concepts—from a previous era that can be “jettisoned.” Human social behavior is extremely complicated and nuanced, and it’s nice to have a variety of words to use to talk about it. Okay, on to Anscombe’s third thesis. Thesis 3 The third thesis takes us deeper into the weeds of English philosophy. Modern moral philosophy, Anscombe claims, is essentially “consequentialist.” Consequentialism holds that we need to look at the effects or consequences of an act to determine whether it is right or wrong. I think this is, empirically, one of the This, of course, presupposes a condition of relative abundance. A society in a condition of extreme scarcity might consider it highly immoral to waste food. 2 8 ways (but not the only way) people ​do make moral determinations. But Anscombe’s concern is really this: every one of the best known English academic moral philosophers has put out a philosophy according to which, e.g., it is not possible to hold that it cannot be right to kill the innocent as a means to any end whatsoever and that someone who thinks otherwise is in error. … Now this is a significant thing: for it means that all these philosophies are quite incompatible with the Hebrew-Christian ethic. (9–10) It is not very interesting to me whether this is a historically accurate reading of “English academic moral philosophy.” So I will skirt the weeds and move to her broader concern, which is the comparison of consequentialism or modern ethics with “the Hebrew-Christian ethic.” I have already mentioned that divine law ethics cannot literally stop anyone from doing anything bad; it just gives people a reason not to do such things. (Whatever enforcement there is comes from human institutions.) But Anscombe is concerned that modern moral philosophy cannot, or does not wish to, make the killing of an innocent (i.e., murder) for some end impermissible ​in principle​. Now, virtually no moral philosophy would wish to condone the killing of an innocent person. At the same time, it’s always possible to come up with a situation where this seems like a reasonable option. For example, the Trolley Problem: If a runaway trolley is going to kill five people on its present course, is it (morally) acceptable to divert the trolley so that it kills only one person? Well, 9 what does the Hebrew-Christian ethic tell us to do in this situation? My claim is that it tells us nothing that is any more useful than what the standard modern moral philosophies tell us—which is to say, it tells us very little. We ought not kill, sure. But if we can save a life, should we try to save a life? If we can act so that less people die rather than more, but we do not so act, are we m ​ urdering the greater number? Or is this just “letting them die”? And, if so, is “letting people die” somehow morally better than “murdering them”? Neither Jesus nor Sidgwick can tell us for certain what to do here. Then there is the problem of defining “innocent,” as in: “it cannot be right to kill the innocent.” Innocence is, sadly but empirically, a matter of perspective. The Catholic Church may maintain that it is wrong to commit murder, yet it has been responsible for killing many a heretic whom a non-Catholic would consider innocent. In short, the Hebrew-Christian ethic has not stopped Hebrew-Christians from killing “the innocent” when it suited them to do so. Why should secular moral philosophy take a firm stand on the issue? The field of modern moral philosophy has its problems. But its problems are at root no different from those of any other system of thought which attempts to impose order on the complex and ever-fluctuating web of implicit and explicit norms—inevitably rife with internal contradictions and exceptions—that guides social behavior. In a 1982 address Anscombe argued that, morally-speaking, Catholics “ought to regard ourselves, as we do not, I fear, as separate” (“Morality” 116). One certainly feels this pull toward separation in her 1958 essay. But Catholics, at least in 10 this fallen world, are as implicated as the rest of us in a social life that does its damnedest to resist the creation of an ultimately coherent and binding moral philosophy. R​EFERENCES Anscombe, G. E. M. “Modern Moral Philosophy.” P ​ hilosophy 33/124 (1958): 1–19. ———. “Morality.” In ​Faith in a Hard Ground: Essays on Religion, Philosophy and Ethics​. Ed. Mary Geach and Luke Gormally. Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2008. Nietzsche, Friedrich. ​The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings​. Ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman. Trans. Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Schopenhauer, Arthur. T ​ he Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics​. Trans. and ed. Christopher Janaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 11