Chapter Twelve - Are There Any Intrinsically Unjust Acts?

Summary

Preamble

In ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ Elizabeth Anscombe famously argued for three theses: that moral philosophy should be laid aside until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology; that the concepts of moral obligation and moral duty, and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of ‘ought’, ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; and that the differences between the well-known English writers on moral philosophy from Sidgwick to the present day (i.e. 1958) are of little importance.

The reason for her third thesis relates to that trend in modern moral thought which Anscombe dubbed ‘consequentialism’. Consequentialism, she argued, is incompatible both with the ethical tradition at the heart of Western culture, the Hebrew-Christian ethic, and with ancient Greek thought. In both these traditions we find the belief that certain things are ruled out absolutely – such things as killing the innocent, vicarious punishment and treachery. Consequentialism abandons such ethical absolutism, an abandonment which Anscombe regarded as a disaster. Any differences between modern, consequentialist positions must therefore appear trifling in comparison with their ominous similarity; this is the purport of her third thesis.

To say that killing the innocent is absolutely ruled out is not, for Anscombe, to allege an absolute ‘moral obligation’ not to kill the innocent; for (as her second thesis proposes) the language of ‘moral obligation’ is, for various reasons, best avoided. Rather, the typical ground for saying that something is absolutely ruled out is that it is intrinsically unjust. Generally speaking, talk of moral obligation, where by such talk someone is attempting to say something worth saying, can be replaced by talk of justice and injustice. And talk of absolute moral obligation is typically to be replaced by talk of intrinsic injustice.

In this essay I aim to examine what Anscombe means by ‘intrinsic injustice’, and what can be said for her view that there are intrinsically unjust types of act – i.e. types of act which are absolutely ruled out.