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— Modern Moral Philosophy G. E. M. Anscombe Philosophy 33, No. 124 January 1958 I will begin by stating three theses which I present in this paper. The first is that it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking. The second is that the concepts of obligation, and duty - moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral 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 sur- vives, and are only harmful without it. My third thesis is that the differences between the well-known English writ- ers on moral philosophy from Sidgwick to the present day are of little importance. Anyone who has read Aristotle's Ethics and has also read modern moral philosophy must have been struck by the great contrasts between them. The concepts which are prominent among the moderns seem to be lacking, or at any rate buried or far in the background, in Aristotle. Most noticeably, the term "moral" itself, which we have by direct inheritance Aristotle, just doesn't seem to fit, in its modern sense, into an account of Aristotelian ethics. Aristotle dis- tinguishes virtues as moral and intellectual. Have some of what he calls "intellectual” virtues what we should call a “moral” aspect? It would seem so; the criterion is presum- ably that a failure in an “intellectual" virtue like that of having good judgment in calculating how to bring about something useful, say in municipal government may be blameworthy. But it may reasonably be asked - can- not any failure be made a matter of blame or reproach? Any derogatory criticism, say of the workmanship of a product or the design of a machine, can be called blame or reproach. So we want to put in the word "morally" again: sometimes such a failure may be morally blameworthy, sometimes not. Now has Aristotle got this idea of moral blame, as opposed to any other? If he has, why isn't it more central? There are some mistakes, he says, which are causes, not of involun- tariness in actions but of scoundrelism, and for which a man is blamed. Does this mean that there is a moral obligation not to make certain intellectual mistakes? Why doesn't he discuss obligation in general, and this obligation in partic- ular? If someone professes to be expounding Aristotle and talks in a modern fashion about "moral" such-and-such he must be very imperceptive if he does not constantly feel like someone whose jaws have somehow got out of alignment: the teeth don't come together in a proper bite. We cannot then, look to Aristotle for any elucidation of the modern way of talking about "moral" goodness, obligation, etc. And all the best-known writers on ethics in modern times, from Butler to Mill, appear to me to have faults as thinkers on the subject which make it impossible to hope for any direct light on it from them. I will state these objections with the brevity which their character makes possible. Butler exalts conscience, but appears ignorant that a man's conscience may tell him to do the vilest things. Hume defines “truth” in such a way as to exclude ethical judgments from it, and professes that he has proved that they are so excluded. He also implicitly defines "passion" in such a way that aiming at anything is having a passion. His objection to passing from “is” to “ought” would ap- ply equally to passing from “is" to "owes" or from "is" to "needs." (However, because of the historical situation, he has a point here, which I shall return to.) Kant introduces the idea of "legislating for oneself," which is as absurd as if in these days, when majority votes com- mand great respect, one were to call each reflective deci- sion a man made a vote resulting in a majority, which as a matter of proportion is overwhelming, for it is always 1-0. The concept of legislation requires superior power in the legislator. His own rigoristic convictions on the sub- ject of lying were so intense that it never occurred to him 2 seems to me a that a lie could be relevantly described as anything but just a lie (e.g. as "a lie in such-and-such circumstances"). His rule about universalizable maxims is useless without stip- ulations as to what shall count as a relevant description of an action with a view to constructing a maxim about it. Bentham and Mill do not notice the difficulty of the concept "pleasure." They are often said to have gone wrong through committing the “naturalistic fallacy"; but this charge does not impress me, because I do not find accounts of it coher- ent. But the other point about pleasure fatal objection from the very outset. The ancients found this concept pretty baffling. It reduced Aristotle to sheer bab- ble about "the bloom on the cheek of youth" because, for good reasons, he wanted to make it out both identical with and different from the pleasurable activity. Generations of modern philosophers found this concept quite unperplex- ing, and it reappeared in the literature as a problematic one only a year or two ago when Ryle wrote about it. The reason is simple: since Locke, pleasure was taken to be some sort of internal impression. But it was superficial, if that was the right account of it, to make it the point of actions. One might adapt something Wittgenstein said about "meaning" and say "Pleasure cannot be an internal impression, for no internal impression could have the consequences of plea- sure." Mill also, like Kant, fails to realize the necessity for stip- ulation as to relevant descriptions, if his theory is to have content. It did not occur to him that acts of murder and theft could be otherwise described. He holds that where a proposed action is of such a kind as to fall under some one principle established on grounds of utility, one must go by that; where it falls under none or several, the several sug- gesting contrary views of the action, the thing to do is to calculate particular consequences. But pretty well any ac- tion can be so described as to make it fall under a variety of principles of utility (as I shall say for short) if it falls under any. with I will now return to Hume. The features of Hume's phi- losophy which I have mentioned, like many other features of it, would incline me to think that Hume was a mere brilliant sophist; and his procedures are certainly so- phistical. But I am forced, not to reverse, but to add to, this judgment by a peculiarity of Hume's philosophizing: namely that although he reaches his conclusions which he is in love by sophistical methods, his consid- erations constantly open up very deep and important prob- lems. It is often the case that in the act of exhibiting the sophistry one finds oneself noticing matters which deserve a lot of exploring: the obvious stands in need of investiga- tions as a result of the points that Hume pretends to have made. In this, he is unlike, say, Butler. It was already well known that conscience could dictate vile actions; for But- ler to have written disregarding this does not open up any new topics for us. But with Hume it is otherwise: hence he is a very profound and great philosopher, in spite of his sophistry. For example: Suppose that I say to my grocer "Truth consists in either relations of ideas, as that 20s=£1, or matters of fact, as that I ordered potatoes, you supplied them, and you sent me a bill. So it doesn't apply to such a proposition as that I owe you such-and-such a sum." 3 Now if one makes this comparison, it comes to light that the relation of the facts mentioned to the description "X owes Y so much money" is an interesting one, which I will call that of being "brute relative to” that description. Further, the "brute" facts mentioned here themselves have descrip- tions relatively to which other facts are "brute" as, e.g., he had potatoes carted to my house and they were left there are brute facts relative to "he supplied me with potatoes." And the fact X owes Y money is in turn “brute” relative to other descriptions e.g. "X is solvent." Now the rela- tion of "relative bruteness" is a complicated one. To men- tion a few points: if xyz is a set of facts brute relative to a description A, then xyz is a set out of a range some set among which holds if A holds; but the holding of some set among these does not necessarily entail A because ex- ceptional circumstances can always make a difference; and what are exceptional circumstance relatively to A can gen- erally only be explained by giving a few diverse examples, and no theoretically adequate provision can be made for ex- ceptional circumstances, since a further special context can theoretically always be imagined that would reinterpret any special context. Further, though in normal circumstances, xyz would be a justification for A, of which institution A is of course not itself a description. (E.g. the statement that I give someone a shilling is not a description of the institution of money or of the currency of the country.) Thus, though it would be ludicrous to pretend that there can be no such thing as a transition from, e.g., "is" to "owes," the charac- ter of the transition is in fact rather interesting and comes to light as a result of reflecting on Hume's arguments. ¹ ¹The above two paragraphs are an abstract of a paper "On Brute Facts," Analysis That I owe the grocer such-and-such a sum would be one of a set of facts which would be "brute" in relation to the description "I am a bilker.” “bilking" is of course a species of "dishonesty" or "injustice." (Naturally the consideration will not have any effect on my actions unless I want to com- mit or avoid acts of injustice.) So far, in spite of their strong associations, I conceive "bilk- ing," "injustice" and "dishonesty" in a merely factual way. That I can do this for "bilking" is obvious enough; "justice" I have no idea how to define, except that its sphere is that of actions which relate to someone else, but "injustice," its defect, can for the moment be offered as a generic name covering various species. E.g.: "bilking,” “theft” (which is relative to whatever property institutions exist), "slander," "adultery," "punishment of the innocent." In present-day philosophy an explanation is required how an unjust man is a bad man, or an unjust action a bad one; to give such an explanation belongs to ethics; but it cannot even be begun until we are equipped with a sound philos- ophy of psychology. For the proof that an unjust man is a bad man would require a positive account of justice as a "virtue." This part of the subject-matter of ethics, is how- ever, completely closed to us until we have an account of what type of characteristic a virtue is a problem, not of ethics, but of conceptual analysis and how it relates to the actions in which it is instanced: a matter which I think Aristotle did not succeed in really making clear. For this we certainly need an account at least of what a human action is at all, and how its description as "doing such-and-such" 2 18, 3 (1958). is affected by its motive and by the intention or intentions in it; and for this an account of such concepts is required. The terms "should" or "ought" or "needs" relate to good and bad: e.g. machinery needs oil, or should or ought to be oiled, in that running without oil is bad for it, or it runs badly without oil. According to this conception, of course, "should" and "ought” are not used in a special “moral” sense when one says that a man should not bilk. (In Aris- totle's sense of the term "moral" (ńÐɩxóc), they are being used in connection with a moral subject-matter: namely that of human passions and (non-technical) actions.) But they have now acquired a special so-called "moral" sense i.e. a sense in which they imply some absolute verdict (like one of guilty/not guilty on a man) on what is described in the "ought" sentences used in certain types of context: not merely the contexts that Aristotle would call “moral” passions and actions but also some of the contexts that he would call "intellectual." The ordinary (and quite indispensable) terms "should," "needs," "ought," "must" — acquired this special sense by being equated in the relevant contexts with "is obliged," or "is bound," or "is required to," in the sense in which one can be obliged or bound by law, or something can be required by law. How did this come about? The answer is in history: be- tween Aristotle and us came Christianity, with its law con- ception of ethics. For Christianity derived its ethical no- tions from the Torah. (One might be inclined to think that a law conception of ethics could arise only among people who accepted an allegedly divine positive law; that this is not so is shown by the example of the Stoics, who also thought that whatever was involved in conformity to hu- man virtues was required by divine law.) In consequence of the dominance of Christianity for many centuries, the concepts of being bound, permitted, or excused became deeply embedded in our language and thought. The Greek word "auaotáveiv," the aptest to be turned to that use, acquired the sense "sin," from having meant "mistake," "missing the mark," "going wrong." The Latin peccatum which roughly corresponded to àμagtnua was even apter for the sense "sin," because it was already associated with "culpa" - "guilt" - a juridical notion. The blanket term “illicit,” “unlawful,” meaning much the same as our blanket term "wrong," explains itself. It is in- teresting that Aristotle did not have such a blanket term. He has blanket terms for wickedness - "villain," "scoundrel"; but of course a man is not a villain or a scoundrel by the per- formance of one bad action, or a few bad actions. And he has terms like "disgraceful," "impious"; and specific terms signifying defect of the relevant virtue, like “unjust”; but no term corresponding to "illicit." The extension of this term (i.e. the range of its application) could be indicated. in his terminology only by a quite lengthy sentence: that is "illicit" which, whether it is a thought or a consented-to passion or an action or an omission in thought or action, is something contrary to one of the virtues the lack of which shows a man to be bad qua man. That formulation would yield a concept co-extensive with the concept "illicit." To have a law conception of ethics is to hold that what is needed for conformity with the virtues failure in which is the mark of being bad qua man (and not merely, say, qua 5 craftsman or logician) that what is needed for this, is required by divine law. Naturally it is not possible to have such a conception unless you believe in God as a law-giver; like Jews, Stoics, and Christians. But if such a conception is dominant for many centuries, and then is given up, it is a natural result that the concepts of "obligation," of being bound or required as by a law, should remain though they had lost their root; and if the word “ought” has become in- vested in certain contexts with the sense of "obligation," it too will remain to be spoken with a special emphasis and special feeling in these contexts. It is as if the notion "criminal" were to remain when crim- inal law and criminal courts had been abolished and for- gotten. A Hume discovering this situation might conclude that there was a special sentiment, expressed by "criminal," which alone gave the word its sense. So Hume discovered the situation which the notion "obligation" survived, and the notion "ought" was invested with that peculiar for hav- ing which it is said to be used in a “moral” sense, but in which the belief in divine law had long since been aban- doned: for it was substantially given up among Protestants at the time of the Reformation. The situation, if I am right, was the interesting one of the survival of a concept outside the framework of thought that made it a really intelligible one. When Hume produced his famous remarks about the tran- 2They did not deny the existence of divine law; but their most characteristic doc- trine was that it was given, not to be obeyed, but to show man's incapacity to obey it, even by grace; and this applied not merely to the ramified prescriptions of the Torah, but to the requirements of “natural divine law." Cf. in this connection the decree of Trent against the teaching that Christ was only to be trusted in as mediator, not obeyed as legislator.
