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Modern Moral Philosophy and the Problem of Relevant Descriptions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Onora O'Neill
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Extract

Anscombe's indictment of modern moral philosophy is full-blooded. She began with three strong claims:

The first is that is not profitable to do moral philosophy… until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking. The second is that the concepts of obligation and duty… and of the moral sense of ‘ought’, ought to be jettisoned… because they are derivatives… from an earlier conception of ethics… and are only harmful without it. The third thesis is that the differences between the well-known English writers on moral philosophy from Sidgwick to the present are of little importance.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 54 , March 2004 , pp. 301 - 316
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2004

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References

1 Anscombe, G. E. M., ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, Vol. III, Ethics, Religion and Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 26Google Scholar.

2 ibid.

3 Maclntyre, A., After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1983), 53Google Scholar.

4 ibid., 50.

5 ibid.

6 ibid., 51.

7 Anscombe, G. E. M., ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, 30Google Scholar.

8 ibid., 37.

9 ibid., 30.

10 ibid., 32.

11 Nussbaum, Martha C., Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Anscombe, G. E. M., ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, 38 and 41Google Scholar.

13 For example, in Owen, Flanagan and Amélie Oksenberg, Rorty, (eds.), Identity Character and Morality: Essays in Moral Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

14 Anscombe, G. E. M., ‘Two Kinds of Error in Action’, in Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, Vol. III, Ethics, Religion and Politics (Blackwell, Oxford, 1981), 3Google Scholar.

15 ibid., 4–5.

16 Anscombe, G. E. M., ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, 27Google Scholar.

17 ibid., 34.

18 ibid., 34; cf. 39–40.

19 For example, she upbraids Sidgwick for his simplistic claim that we are responsible for all foreseen effects of action, and his failure to distinguish good action that has foreseen but unintended bad effects from bad action, ibid., 35–6; she concludes with splendid certainty that ‘it is a necessary feature of consequentialism that it is a shallow philosophy’, ibid., 36.

20 Anscombe, G. E. M., Intention, (Oxford, Blackwell, 1957), 8Google Scholar.

21 ibid.

22 Herman, Barbara, The Practice of Moral Judgement (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 77Google Scholar.

23 ibid., 78.

24 ibid., 79.

25 ibid., 79.

26 ibid., 81. Cf. also ‘To be a moral agent one must be trained to perceive situations in terms of their morally significant features (as described by the RMS)’, 83; ‘The role of the RMS in moral judgment is to provide the descriptive moral categories (sic) that permit the formulation of maxims suitable for assessment by the CI procedure’, 84; They ‘guide the normal moral agent to the perception and description of the morally relevant features of his circumstances’, 78.

27 ibid., 86.

28 ibid., 85. She locates this foundation in the Moral Law itself, and draws on the Fact of Reason passages in the Critique of Practical Reason to support her reading. This is not the occasion in which to query Herman's reading of those difficult passages; in my view they are about the status of practical reason and not about judgment. For a different reading of the passages see O'Neill, Onora, ‘Autonomy and the Fact of Reason in the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft’, 30–41, in Hoffe, Otfried, (ed.), Immanuel Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, Klassiker Auslegen Bd. 26, 2002), 81–97Google Scholar.

29 See McDowell, John, ‘Deliberation and Moral Development’ in Engstrom, S. and Whiting, J., (eds.) Aristotle, Kant and the Stoics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 23Google Scholar.

30 ibid.

31 ibid., 26.

32 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgement, tr. Meredith, , (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973) 18/179Google Scholar.

33 Anscombe, G. E. M., Modern Moral Philosophy, 33Google Scholar.

34 ibid.

35 ibid., 37.

36 ibid., 27.

37 ibid., 41.

38 Consider the startling remark ‘What obliges is the divine law$;as rules oblige in a game’, ibid., 41. It seems clear that it is the source, not the form or the content of law that is viewed as authoritative.

39 ibid., 37.