Reading Elizabeth Anscombe - an Unusual Path to Ethics
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This semester, I got to join an Elizabeth Anscombe reading group convened by Dr. Nathan Hauthaler.1 Elizabeth Anscombe is a British philosopher of the 20th century, known for her contribution to action theory and virtue ethics. Her works reflect a unique combination of Aristotelian ancient tradition with the Wittgensteinian analytic method.
In the reading group, we focused on her view on ethics. Among the different papers we read and discussed, I would like to share one article we read recently: “Medalist’s Address: Action, Intention and ‘Double Effect.’”2 As the title suggests, the paper is rich and dense in content, covering topics moral actions, the role of intentions in determining the goodness of certain acts, and how to interpret the doctrine of ‘double effect.’ It is not the most cited article in philosophy (I found 14 citations on the Philosophy Document Center), but I found many thought-provoking points in it. The following are the three arguments of Anscombe that I found interesting.
1. Human actions (or acts) (e.g., caring) can be defined as ‘moral actions’ and are different from the actions (or acts) of human beings (e.g., standing).
Right away, in the beginning, she makes this bold claim that human actions are “moral actions” and vice versa. She does not prove this, but she seems to take this as a tautological definitional point. She later defines ‘moral’ goodness to be “the goodness of actions, passions, and habits of action and feeling” and notes that this is a “distinguishing one, restricted to specific goodness, goodness simpliciter,” different from “the generic good of being a human action or passion or disposition.”3
I interpret this as follows. Human actions are actions about which we can make specific ‘moral’ judgments. They also bear generic goodness by being human actions,4 but the ‘moral’ judgments we can have on them are different from this generic goodness. Rather, the ‘moral’ judgments are the specific goodness, determined by the generic goodness plus some other factors that may counterbalance this generic goodness.5
2. The general goodness of actions is different from the goodness of action-descriptions. We can have ‘moral’ action descriptions for actions that are not in themselves ‘moral’ or human actions.
She makes a distinction between the actions and action-descriptions as well. She seems to use the term ‘action’ to refer to one concept that just denotes an action (e.g., walking, killing, gardening) and ‘action-description’ to refer to the contextually dependent description of a series of things that an agent does. A series of mere actions of human beings can also constitute a moral action-description.
Anscombe probably wants to judge the specific goodness of behavior (or what we in the 21st century call the ‘morality’ of a person’s behavior) in each action-description. She suggests that every complexity added to a situation may make many actions wrong (though it would have been good otherwise) or justified (though it would have just been a mere evil action otherwise).
I had the following critical takeaway from this. When we make moral laws or principles, we are necessarily generalizing and discussing at the level of general human actions. However, our everyday morality may depend on many contextual complexities, which we can take into account only by paying attention to the details of the action-descriptions. When we apply moral laws or principles to action-descriptions, tiny detail of the description may sway the priority among principles or how strongly a principle holds.
3. When we examine the goodness of action-descriptions, there is a tremendous variety in how we can determine whether the act under an action-description is good or not; there does not seem to be just one law governing it.
This last point, I believe, is an implicit critique against consequentialism. She compares two actions: murder and amputation, and how the process of determining their goodness differs when they are embedded in action-descriptions. She suggests that the evilness of murder is confirmed when we know the mental state of the person (awake and compos mentis), whether it was private (as opposed to the authority), and whether it was on purpose (not an accident). It is not the consequence that influences the evilness of an action. On the other hand, amputation, which is an evil action by itself, may be justified if it is done for a further end that serves the amputated person. In this case, what the amputation is done for is essential.
This example is her acknowledgment that in some actions (embedded under an action-description), what it is done for (i.e., expected consequence) is important and can justify a behavior. However, she seems to be arguing that amputation is just one case and this is not a golden rule. This argument cautions the consequentialists trying to reduces the goodness of actions to the consequences.
What I described here is not an exhaustive summary of her argument. I am also not very confident that I interpreted and explained her point perfectly, as her language tends to be intricate and dense. However, reading her work and explaining it this way has been a fruitful experience for me. The above points all tackled ethics from an unusual angle, coming from a very rigorous analysis of description and action theory. I hope it was a thought-provoking little piece for you too, and if you are interested, I highly recommend that you check out the original work.
1 Lecturer in Philosophy at Duke Kunshan University, Assistant Professor of the Practice in Global Studies at Duke University, and the Barry Foundation Fellow of the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society (PRRUCS) at the University of Pennsylvania
2 G. E. M. Anscombe, “Medalist’s Address: Action, Intention and ‘Double Effect’,” ed. Michael Baur, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 56 (1982): 12–25, https://doi.org/10.5840/acpaproc19825611.
3 Ibid, p.17
4 This is a contestable point she claims elsewhere in the article, in reference to some catholic tradition of ethics.
5 In discussing this, she refers to the saying "Bonum ex integra causa, malum ex quocunque defectu.” (Ibid, p.15)
