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… it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking.
These words state one of the principal theses of Elizabeth Anscombe's ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ (1958). Later in the article, the point is reiterated more specifically and with more force:
is it not clear that there are several concepts that need investigating simply as part of the philosophy of psychology and – as I should recommend – banishing ethics totally from our minds? Namely – to begin with: ‘action’, ‘intention’, ‘pleasure’, ‘wanting’. More will probably turn up if we start with these.
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References
1 Anscombe, G. E. M., ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, in Ethics, Religion and Politics: Collected Philosophical Papers, Vol. III (Blackwell, 1981), p. 26Google Scholar.
2 Anscombe, ibid., p. 38.
3 , Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe, G. E. M., 3rd edn (Blackwell, 1967), p. 178Google Scholar.
4 There is a deliberate ambiguity here, as between the origins of a concept and the teaching of it to a child.
5 Cf. On Certainty, par. 402, where Wittgenstein quotes Goethe's ‘Im Anfang war die Tat’ (Faust).
6 In this respect, I am of course in agreement with what Strawson said of the concept of a person in his book Individuals.
7 It is a very interesting question, but one to answer which would be beyond the scope of this article, whether the blurredness of the concept ‘homo sapiens’ corresponds, as it were, to that of ‘person8. After death, I suspect that it does: decomposition is a gradual process, and our hesitation in calling what is before us a (dead) member of a certain species will increase alongside our hesitation in calling it a dead person, in saying things like ‘There lies King Olaf’. (Our reactions to a corpse are of course different from those to a living person, but they are still specifically human in nature.)
8 E.g. Anscombe, ibid., p. 34.
9 Singer, Peter, Practical Ethics, 1st edn (Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 123–4, 131-2.Google ScholarPractical Ethics is standardly used as a moral philosophy textbook.
10 A fault of classical utilitarianism was its taking such psychological states as pleasure to be sensations, or like sensations. The ‘sensation’ model of psychological states is one that has been often and effectively argued against by Elizabeth Anscombe.
11 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, par. 284.
12 Part of William Blake's, ‘A Divine Image’, from Songs of Experience.
13 In , Strawson's Freedom and Resentment (Methuen, 1974)Google Scholar.
14 Part of Blake's, ‘The Divine Image’, from Songs of Innocence.