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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 May 2010
Anscombe's indictment of modern moral philosophy is fullblooded. 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.
The connections between these three thoughts are not immediately obvious, but their influence is not in doubt. Many exponents of virtue ethics take Anscombe's essay as a founding text and have endorsed all three thoughts. Many contemporary consequentialists and theorists of justice, who may reasonably be thought the heirs of the ‘modern moral philosophy’ that Anscombe criticized, have disputed or disregarded all three. Yet I believe that Anscombe's essay is neither as reassuring for contemporary virtue ethics, nor as damaging to other strands in contemporary moral philosophy as this snapshot account of its influence could suggest.
Anscombe's Diagnosis and Virtue Ethics
Anscombe diagnoses many modern attempts to do moral philosophy as failing for lack of an adequate philosophy of psychology. As she sees it, we still use a moral vocabulary that once had sense and resonance, but we now have no adequate grip on the philosophy of psychology that supports that vocabulary.
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