Reading group: Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958), the essay that brought back the virtues, in two sittings
Its coordinates: 3.1 Meta-Ethics · 3.1.1 Moral Realism vs Anti-Realism · 3.1.2 Moral Semantics +1 more
To go with today's question of the day, a short reading group on one of the most influential essays of the last century: Elizabeth Anscombe's Modern Moral Philosophy, published in the journal Philosophy in 1958. It is about twenty pages, and it is often credited with starting the modern revival of virtue ethics.
Anscombe opens with three theses:
- It is not profitable to do moral philosophy until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology.
- The concepts of moral obligation and moral duty, and of what is morally right and wrong, and the moral sense of "ought", should be jettisoned if possible, because they are survivals from an earlier conception of ethics that no longer generally survives.
- The differences between the well-known English writers on moral philosophy from Sidgwick onwards are of little importance.
The earlier conception she has in mind is a law conception of ethics, which made sense when people believed in a divine lawgiver. Without one, she argues, "morally ought" is a word that has lost its meaning but kept its force. The essay is also where the word "consequentialism" was coined.
Sitting one: the three theses and the argument about "ought".
Sitting two: her attack on consequentialism and her proposal to return to concepts like "unjust" and to the study of human flourishing.
A question to bring: if Anscombe is right, can a secular ethics keep the word "ought" at all?