Acting Well

Summary

Introduction

I am very happy indeed to contribute to this series of lectures, especially because I owe most of my training in philosophy to Elizabeth Anscombe, whose work has given the series its name. I am deeply indebted to the marvellous generosity of her teaching, to the example she set me of an unrelentingly thorough and serious thinker, to the unobtrusive way she introduced me to Wittgenstein's later philosophy. Through Elizabeth Anscombe I also made the acquaintance of my friend Philippa Foot, whose work in moral philosophy has, over decades and more than anyone else's, influenced my own. I hope it will be possible to recognize in what I am going to say here not indeed the excellence but at least traces of the beneficial influence of both these philosophers.

This lecture is on acting well. It has two parts, matching the two notions that go to make up its title. Its aims is to show that these notions are interdependent in the sense that grasp of the notion of acting well is not a matter of grasping and putting together antecedently intelligible notions of acting and of goodness. More particularly, I hope to establish the following two theses:

Thesis 1, implying a version of ‘descriptivism’: To grasp the notion of acting as it occurs in ‘acting well/badly’, you have to know not what might be common to all cases of acting, but rather which standards of evaluation the use of ‘acting’ invokes. […]