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Absolute Prohibitions without Divine Promises

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Sabina Lovibond
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Extract

Elizabeth Anscombe's ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ is read and remembered principally as a critique of the state of ethical theory at the time when she was writing—an account of certain faulty assumptions underlying that theory in its different variants, and rendering trivial the points on which they ostensibly disagree. Not unreasonably, the essay serves as a starting point for the recent Oxford Readings collection on ‘virtue ethics’, and as an authoritative text on the failings of other approaches with which philosophy students have to acquaint themselves. Yet what really commands attention on rereading it is Anscombe's denunciation of the impotence of current moral philosophy to generate resistance to certain quite specific forms of wrongdoing. The question that provides a kind of gold standard here, recurring several times in the course of the discussion, is that of the killing (or judicial execution or other ‘punishment’) of the innocent in order to avoid some putatively greater evil, or to bring about some sufficiently great good.

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Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 54 , March 2004 , pp. 141 - 158
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2004

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References

1 Copyright © Poems by Cavafy, C. P., trans, [from Greek] by Mavrogordato, John, published by Chatto, and Windus, , 1951, p. 19Google Scholar. Reprinted by permission of the Random House GroupLtd and reproduced by permission of the estate of C. P. Cavafy c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London Wll 1JN. Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge &White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN.

2 Anscombe, G. E. M., ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ (hereafter ‘MMP’), in her Ethics, Religion and Politics: Collected Philosophical Papers, Volume III (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981)Google Scholar, to which page numbers here refer; also in Crisp, Roger and Slote, Michael (eds) Virtue Ethics (Oxford University Press, 1997).Google Scholar

3 MMP, p. 29.

4 ibid., p. 33.

5 ibid.

6 ibid., p. 34.

7 ibid., pp. 38–42.

8 ibid., p. 38.

9 ibid., p. 39.

10 ibid., p. 36.

11 ibid., p. 39.

12 ibid., p. 40. Hooker, Brad quotes these words in Ideal Code, Real World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000, p. 130)Google Scholar and comments in a footnote: ‘Anscombe's quip, while perhaps amusing, is a paradigm case of arguing by begging the question at hand’. I must confess that the ‘quip’ is lost on me. What phrasing should Anscombe have chosen in order to make her point simply and sincerely? Also, if we expand the quotation by a few words, we find that she says of the kind of thinker she is envisaging: ‘I do not want to argue with him; he shows a corrupt mind’ (emphasis added). What more could she have done to indicate that she is not arguing but declining to argue?

13 ibid., p. 42.

14 ibid.

15 G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘War and Murder’ (hereafter ‘WM’), in her Ethics, Religion and Politics.

16 WM, p. 57.

17 ibid., p. 60.

18 ibid. This ‘anything goes’ attitude did not die out with the end of the anti-communist cold war. Thus Polly Toynbee writes on the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan: ‘Seeing only distant puffs of smoke, a queasy public is left to imaginethe worst—civilian bloodshed and a military stalemate. Air war is always a publicrelations disaster …’ However, she continues, ‘It is a kind of decadence to forget that only one thing matters—the right side must win’ (The Guardian, 7th November 2001; emphasis added).

19 MMP, p. 42.

20 ‘Barbarism: A User's Guide’ (hereafter ‘Barbarism’), in his On History (Abacus, 1998), to which the page numbers here refer; also in New Left Review 206 (July/August 1994). This essay was originally a contribution to the 1994 series of Oxford Amnesty Lectures. For another succinct review of the ‘totalization’ of warfare over the past century, see Howard, Michael, ‘Can War be Controlled?’, in Elshtain, Jean Bethke (ed.) Just War Theory (Blackwell, 1992), pp. 28–31Google Scholar. Also falling within the scope of Hobsbawm's discussionis the practice of torture by governments (‘Barbarism’, pp. 342–348).

21 ‘Barbarism’, p. 335.

22 ibid., p. 339.

23 ibid.

24 ibid., p. 335.

25 ibid., p. 336.

26 See Anscombe, G. E. M., Intention, 2nd edn (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963), p. 64.Google Scholar

27 MMP, p. 41.

28 ibid.

29 ibid., p. 42.

30 WM, p. 61.

31 Hursthouse, Rosalind, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford University Press, 1999), ch. 8; see esp. pp. 179–185.Google Scholar

32 This is intended as a possible reply to the moral sceptic, not as an account of our actual incentives to co-operate with the process of moral upbringing when we ourselves are subjected to it.

33 On the influence of ‘obstetric imagery’ in the Marxist tradition (implying that political agency only facilitates what is destined to happen anyway), and on the intellectual consequences of renouncing this imagery, see Cohen, G. A., If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? (Harvard University Press, 2000).Google Scholar

34 I mean among those who regard Enlightenment values, with Hobsbawm, as ‘the only foundation for all the aspirations to build societies fit for all human beings to live in anywhere on this earth, and for the assertion and defence of their human rights as persons’ (‘Barbarism’, p. 336).

35 Foot, Philippa, Natural Goodness (Oxford University Press, 2001), p.74n.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36 WM, p. 61.

37 MMP, p. 37.

38 ibid., p. 40, n. 6.

39 ibid.

40 See Williams, Bernard, ‘Consequentialism and Integrity’, in Scheffler, Samuel (ed.), Consequentialism and its Critics (Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 34Google Scholar. (Thistext was originally published in Smart, J. J. C. and Williams, Bernard, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 82–118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar)

41 ibid., p. 50. (It would be misleading, though, to cite this discussion as aclear instance of the kind of moral philosophy Anscombe has in her sights, since the weight of Williams's argument in it falls mainly on the anti-consequentialist side.)

42 The quoted words are based on a passage in WM (p. 58), explaining the ‘doctrine of double effect’. It is, of course, a purely accidental feature of the present example that the threatened harm is to fall on others rather than on Jim himself (as would have been the case if the ultimatum had taken the form: ‘Kill this one (innocent) person, or we will kill you’). The absolutist, as we read elsewhere, maintains that ‘[w]e may not commit any sin, however small, for the sake of any good, however great, and if the choice lies between our total destruction and the commission of sin, then we must choose to be destroyed’ (‘The Justice of the Present War Examined’, in Anscombe, , Ethics, Religion and Politics, p. 79)Google Scholar. He or she will regard Williams's scenario simply as one in which the principle contained in the first conjunct of the sentence just quoted is particularly likely to be occluded by the presence of benevolence as a motive.

43 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1110a23–26; cf. Eudemian Ethics 1225a25–27.

44 MMP, p. 41.

45 I owe this point to some remarks made by Oswald Hanfling in a seminar discussion.

46 Perhaps moral thinking calls into play, from time to time, different intellectual qualities which are not capable of perfectly harmonious coexistence. Singlemindedness, steadfastness and resolution are indeed virtues, but so is imaginative versatilityor ‘largeness’. It is interesting to note that if Anscombe is, in effect, exalting the former above the latter, she is following in the footsteps of Plato (with his suspicion of poikilia or ‘variegatedness’: see especially Republic, Book III) as well as in the Judaeo-Christian tradition of ‘keeping commandments’.

47 MMP, p. 37.

48 Cf. Hobsbawm, , ‘Barbarism’, p. 336.Google Scholar

49 MMP, p. 37.

50 MMP, p. 42.

51 WM, p. 61.

52 I am grateful to Jeffrey Seidman for detailed comments on an earlier draft of this lecture, as well as to all those members of the audience who took part in discussion on the occasion of its delivery.