Abstract
In a paragraph on ‘Theological and Philosophical Ethics’ from his 1928 Münster lectures on Ethics, Karl Barth remarked that ‘[w]hen, as sometimes happens, the philosophical ethicist of any trend pays attention to theological ethics, he finds himself set in a strange world. What is alien to him here is a presumed and puzzling knowledge of the whence and whither of every ethical question and answer. What is a problem to him, the law or goodness or value which philosophical ethic seeks as a standard by which to measure human conduct, the problem of the truth of the good, seems to be no problem at all here’ (Seabury Press, 1981, p. 20). The theologian, for her part, if she offers an answering glance, encounters a strange world too, an unsettling rearrangement of landmarks and a perceptible shift in the direction of intellectual energy. The source of this mutual estrangement, Barth suggests, is a difference in where the problems are thought by each to lie. Surveying the discussions of her philosophical counterpart, the theologian is apt to be struck by just how much is considered unresolved and how problematic certain familiar concepts and lines of reasoning are taken to be. A productive vis-à-vis between theology and philosophy, therefore, demands a measure of patience. And when the philosopher is as perplexing and unaccommodating as Elizabeth Anscombe, patience will need reinforcement by the promise of reward. The essays that comprise these two handbooks, The Anscombean Mind (AM) and The Oxford Handbook of Elizabeth Anscombe (OHEA), give ample testimony to both the reality of the demand and the reward.
Since her death in 2001, Elizabeth Anscombe’s star has continued to rise in the world of analytic moral philosophy. In the last ten years alone, a raft of edited volumes, book-length guides to her major works, and biographical treatments have been published, not to mention countless articles and dedicated journal issues. Roger Teichmann’s characterization of her as ‘[o]ne of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century’, especially in the realm of practical philosophy, is becoming more readily accepted (p. 1). This surge of enthusiasm and recognition supplies the context within which these two handbooks appeared twinborn in 2022, The Oxford Handbook of Elizabeth Anscombe, under Roger Teichmann, and The Anscombean Mind, under Adrian Haddock and Rachael Wiseman. Thanks to these works, the moral theologian who wishes to engage the corpus of one of the great Catholic minds of the last century now finds herself with a veritable treasury of commentary and criticism.
When compared to philosophy, Anscombe’s reception in the field of Christian ethics appears noticeably restricted. I will not volunteer a theory why, but the start of an answer might incorporate the following factors. On the one hand, in religious matters, she opposed many of the theological trends that gained prominence after Vatican II. At a time, for example, when many theologians were calling for a more dynamic interplay between theology and philosophy, she remained very much a philosopher and not a theologian. She could be read as a trenchant critic of so-called proportionalism in Catholic moral theology, but it was less obvious how she related to the dispute between ‘autonomous’ and ‘faith ethics’. On the other hand, among Christian ethicists favorable to an alliance with analytic philosophy, the kind of moral philosophy Anscombe practiced was less easy to assimilate systematically than that of others. Those with Wittgensteinian proclivities who might have championed her work have tended to learn from the author of the Philosophical Investigations himself and, content with a kind of ethical anti-theory, have left many of Anscombe’s more technical concerns behind. The exception to this neglect has, unsurprisingly, been among Thomists. And so, true to form, the contributors to these volumes most likely to be known to Christian ethicists are (broadly speaking) Thomists: John Berkman, David Albert Jones, and John Haldane.
The two volumes each divide their contributions sensibly among the various topics to which Anscombe contributed. AM replicates the organization adopted for Anscombe’s Collected Philosophical Papers, with four chapters under ‘From Parmenides to Wittgenstein’, nine under ‘Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind’, and nine under ‘Ethics, Religion and Politics’. OHEA’s divisions indicate more specifically Anscombe’s own preoccupations, with parts devoted to ‘Intention’, ‘Ethical Theory’, ‘Human Life’, ‘The First Person’, and ‘Anscombe on/and Other Philosophers’. Although the two books are evenly matched in size and, by my lights, in quality, the Oxford volume slightly edges out its sibling when considered as a resource for moral theology. The Anscombean Mind is very much a metaphysical mind, and without prejudice to the role of metaphysics in practical philosophy, the Christian ethicist will likely find, on balance, more immediately serviceable (and familiar) material supplied in OHEA. If anything, the Oxford volume might be thought to overrepresent Anscombe’s practical thought to the neglect of other themes. Despite the fact that one of those themes is religion (with a few worthy exceptions), this imbalance plays in the moralist’s favor. All the same, one will prefer to avoid an exclusive choice between these two resources, as there are some outstanding entries in AM that find no parallel discussions in OHEA—I would especially mention those by Will Small, Jean-Philippe Narboux, Matthias Haase, and Evgenia Mylonaki.
For the purposes of this review, I want to focus on three areas of inquiry that emerge within these texts: (i) the nature of Anscombe’s Aristotelianism and, more broadly, her relationship to ethical naturalism and virtue ethics, (ii) the soundness and scope of her critique of the ‘moral ought’, (iii) her account of justice and human dignity. As will be evident, these topics share a considerable degree of overlap, but nevertheless each provides a distinct point of orientation.
On the first, Anscombe’s essay ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ is often identified as the breakthrough text for the twentieth-century revival of Aristotelianism and the turn to virtue ethics. There Aristotle is commended for the thought that the virtues are necessary for securing the human good and that human nature, the peculiar life-form of our species, grounds the practical norms governing human conduct, such that just as a man ought to have so many teeth, so he ought to have the virtues. On this approach, the sort of practical necessity at issue in judgments like, ‘you need to return the tools you borrowed’, is what she called an ‘Aristotelian necessity’: ‘that without which some good will not be attained or some evil avoided’ (cited in Müller, OHEA, p. 200). The attempt to generate a comprehensive theory of practical normativity on this basis has been a distinguishing mark of Neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism. John Hacker-Wright’s, ‘Practical Truth, Ethical Naturalism, and the Constitution of Agency in Anscombe’s Ethics’, gives a compelling portrait of how this program might be worked out along Anscombian lines. The curious fact, however, is that although Anscombe ‘outlines an Aristotelian version of ethical naturalism on which norms of human conduct are grounded on what makes us good qua human’, she herself didn’t subscribe to it (OHEA, p. 119). There are at least two reasons behind her non-subscription. Most obviously, she acknowledges, as Aristotelianism does not, the reality of divine law and so affirms a pervasive role for obedience in conceiving human excellence. Second, and more critically, she recognizes virtues that cannot be accounted for by means of Aristotelian necessity, virtues she called ‘supra-utilitarian’, rooted in a ‘mystical perception’ of human dignity.
Evgenia Mylonaki is unequivocal on this point. ‘Anscombe is not an ethical naturalist’ (AM, p. 501). Whereas for Aristotle, human action is understood and evaluated against the ‘description of man’s flourishing qua living being (successfully moving out of a conception of himself as having this or that end)’, for Anscombe it is rather ‘the description of man’s progressing qua spiritual being (successfully moving out of a conception of himself as being a movement towards God’ (AM, p. 501). In a passage reminiscent of C.S. Lewis’s ‘The Weight of Glory’, Anscombe writes, ‘What people are for is, we believe, like guided missiles, to home in on God, God who is the one truth it is infinitely worth knowing, the possession of which you could never get tired of, like the water slaked for ever and always. It’s this potentiality, this incredible possibility, of the knowledge of God of such a kind as even to be sharing in his nature, which Christianity holds out to people; and because of this potentiality every life, right up to the last, must be treated as precious. Its potentialities in all things the world cares about may be slight: but there is always the possibility of what it’s for; we can’t ever know that the time of possibility of gaining eternal life is over, however old, wretched, “useless” someone has become’ (cited in Mylonaki, AM, p. 505). Lest this seem like pious adornment, relegated to the domain of edifying but practically inert discourse, Anscombe regards mystical value as indispensable for underwriting a number of hardly insignificant norms.
She pulls no punches. Her ‘examples include aspects and corollaries of chastity (sexual shame and the appreciation of virginity and celibacy cannot be explained exhaustively by a need they serve), the “respect due to a man’s dead body” (why should we not ‘put [it] out for the collects of refuse to pick up’?), and the prohibition against murder’ (Müller, OHEA, p. 204). As Anselm W. Müller notes, this does not, in and of itself, require a rejection of ethical naturalism—a non-reductive account of human nature can accommodate the mystical—but it does exclude a ‘type of comprehensive functionalist explanation of the necessity to act well’ (Müller, OHEA, p. 205). Thus, as much as Anscombe has lent credibility to the Neo-Aristotelian program of scholars like Philippa Foot, Rosalind Hursthouse, and Michael Thompson, she does as much to lay bare its limits as its potential. The chapter by Matthias Haase corroborates this assessment. He claims that Aristotelian considerations of natural teleology ordered to ‘the organic unity of the whole’ cannot do justice to the dignity of the individual human life (Haase, AM, p. 483). In recognizing the need for recourse to the non-Aristotelian thought of mystical value, Anscombe effectively concurs with Hegel’s claim that the ‘infinite value’ of the person remained outside Greek ethical thought (Haase, AM, p. 485). In this respect, she resembles the personalism of a thinker like Robert Spaemann, for whom the perception of the person cannot exist apart from recognition of her inestimable worth.
A second identifiable area of inquiry concerns the ‘moral ought’. Thesis two of ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ states that the specifically moral sense of ought would be better done away with. Some, like Terence Irwin, have found this claim utterly incredible, denying her claim that a specific notion of moral obligation was alien to ancient Greek thought. But, as Sophie Grace Chappell rightly notes, ‘Her point here is not in the least (pace Crisp 2004, 84) that Aristotle and his contemporaries lacked a vocabulary for expressing practical necessity in general. Of course they didn’t; no form of life remotely like ours would be at all likely to lack that’ (OHEA, p. 112). Rather, the problem with the ought of modern moral philosophy is that it represents a ‘deformation’ of the indispensable concept of practical necessity (Chappell, OHEA, p. 114). That deformation, according to Anscombe’s highly impressionistic genealogy, is the result of two moments, the first identified with the rise of Christianity and the idea of universal divine law and the second with secularization, such that we have become accustomed to think in terms of law but lack a suitable legislator to materially determine and promulgate it.
One need not be an Anscombian critic of modernity (e.g., Alasdair MacIntyre) to accept something like this story. Stephen Darwall, in the first volume of his history of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2023), endorses Anscombe’s claim that modernity is marked by a distinctive conception of deontic normativity. Darwall’s aim is to vindicate this conception against Anscombe’s critique, but he accepts her historical claim that pre-modern ethical thought operated without it. The challenge facing Anscombe is to give a comprehensive and coherent account of practical necessity that avoids the difficulties she identifies in Kantian and consequentialist approaches that rely on the idea of the specifically moral. Much of her work on intention, the nature of action, and practical reason is in service of this project. Anselm Müller’s masterful essay, ‘Anscombe on Ought’, shows how difficult it is to fully accomplish. He argues that Anscombe should concede that ‘ideas of lawlike obligation, requirement, and duty, of the illicit, the permitted, etc.’ are not mere ‘trapping left over from a discarded theory of morality’ but ‘spontaneous and indispensably meaning-constitutive metaphors’ internal to the phenomenology of our practical self-consciousness (OHEA, p. 212, emphasis original). Kantianism provides one interpretation of such lawlike experiences, but it is not the only candidate on offer. The other great interpretation comes from the tradition of natural law. Müller’s essay concludes by sketching a distinctive theory of natural law built from Anscombe’s assorted claims. He designates it ‘syndromic’, because it ‘runs together aspects of thinking that we have so far kept separate’, such as the practical and theoretical, the motivating and explanatory, the underived and the reasoned, etc. (OHEA, p. 219). Müller is perhaps the premier interpreter of Anscombe’s practical philosophy alive today and, as such, this essay deserves to set the agenda for future considerations of this theme.
The final area of inquiry concerns Anscombe’s account of justice. John Berkman (OHEA) brilliantly demonstrates how fundamental to Anscombe’s intellectual development was her concern with justice, particularly the justice (and injustice) of killing. First-time readers may be surprised by how prominently murder features in her writings and, further, that she regards the concept as highly complex and difficult. But given the inability of her peers to perceive President Truman as a mass murderer, she cannot be accused of artificial obfuscation. The above comments on the limits of Aristotelian necessity have already shown that the kind of prohibition properly attached to murder needs to be sought elsewhere. Micah Lott’s ‘The Knowledge of Human Dignity’ and Katharina Nieswandt’s ‘Life and Other Basic Rights in Anscombe’ both provide accounts of where Anscombe looked to secure murder’s absolute prohibition. What they add to the thought of mystical value is reflection on the ‘distinctive type of deontic normativity’ that it entails (Lott, OHEA, p. 301). Both appeal to Anscombe’s notion of ‘stopping modals’, the necessity represented in expressions of protest like ‘You can’t do that’. Stopping modals form a natural linguistic basis for the concept of rights and so hold a key for understanding the nature of justice. ‘The very concept of dignity or of a person, Anscombe seems to think, implies that we regard that being’s flourishing as the source of legitimate demands on us, some of which are absolute’ (Nieswandt, OHEA, p. 320).
Lott doubts that a philosophical argument can be given in order to impart this knowledge of human dignity (Lott, OHEA, p. 300). Nieswandt is more optimistic. She argues that a transcendental argument can be developed that runs as follows: ‘All practical reasoning is directed as the good life; therefore, it is in principle excluded that there could be practically rational (and hence justified) actions aimed at destroying life. A necessary precondition for the possibility of there being such a thing as practical rationality is that such rationality aims at the good of the beings in question (us); so it can’t conform to practical rationality to destroy such beings’ (OHEA, p. 317). Interestingly, Nieswandt is less concessive about the limitations of the Aristotelian approach. A question raised by Matthias Haase’s chapter, however, is whether she has adequately acknowledged the difference between teleology ordered to the species and teleology ordered to the individual. And, in either case, he doubts that the Aristotelian line of thought can give the right sort of reason why murder is wrong: ‘for one’s conduct to be truly just, the other must figure in one’s ultimate practical consideration as the source of or ground of the restriction on the possible courses of action’ (Haase, AM, p. 480). Anscombe was attentive to this problem, but it is far from clear that she found a way to adequately account for it.
Anscombe herself was acutely aware of the incompleteness of her philosophical work. Although she had a good sense of her intended direction, she was convinced that we lacked the intellectual resources to get there at that present time. If today we have come closer to such resources, it is in no small part due to her efforts and to the efforts of those who have moved within the philosophical space that she opened. The Anscombean Mind and The Oxford Handbook of Elizabeth Anscombe provide a wonderful presentation of just this space and a compelling testimony to the vital resource of Anscombe’s thought for anyone seeking to understand the good and the bad in human life.