Elizabeth Anscombe

Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe was one of the most important British philosophers of the twentieth century. A student and close friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein, she became one of his three literary executors and translated his Philosophical Investigations (1953) into English. Her own short book Intention (1957) founded the modern philosophy of action; her paper “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958) coined the word “consequentialism”, argued that the moral “ought” had lost its sense, and launched the revival of virtue ethics; and her pamphlet “Mr Truman’s Degree” (1956) denounced Oxford’s honouring of the president who ordered the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A devout Catholic of formidable intellect and unconventional manner, she taught at Oxford and held Wittgenstein’s old chair at Cambridge (1970–86).

Life

Anscombe was born on 18 March 1919 in Limerick, Ireland, where her father, an English schoolmaster, was serving with the army; she grew up in London. Reading a book on Catholic theology as a teenager, she became convinced and converted. She studied Greats at St Hugh’s College, Oxford (1937–41), then went as a research student to Cambridge, where she attended Wittgenstein’s lectures and became one of his favourite students; he affectionately called her “old man”. In 1941 she married the philosopher Peter Geach; they had seven children. She returned to Oxford as a research fellow and then fellow of Somerville College (1946–70), where she lived in a famously chaotic household, and from 1970 was Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. She died in Cambridge on 5 January 2001.

War and the innocent

In 1939, at twenty, she co-wrote with Norman Daniel a pamphlet, The Justice of the Present War Examined, arguing from just-war principles that Britain’s war, though perhaps just in cause, would be unjust if it involved the bombing of civilians. In 1956, when Oxford proposed an honorary degree for Harry S. Truman, she spoke against it in Convocation. Her pamphlet “Mr Truman’s Degree” argued that “for men to choose to kill the innocent as a means to their ends is always murder”, and that the decision to drop the atomic bombs was such a choice. She was outvoted; the degree was conferred.

Intention

Intention (1957), a dense book of fewer than a hundred pages, asked what it is for an action to be intentional. Her answer: intentional actions are those to which a special sense of the question “Why?” applies — the sense in which the answer gives a reason (“to pump water”, “because I wanted to”) rather than a cause (“I was startled”) or a confession of ignorance (“I didn’t know I was doing it”).

She illustrated with a famous example: a man moving his arm up and down is operating a pump, which is replenishing a house’s water supply, which — since the water has been poisoned — is poisoning the inhabitants. Is he doing one action or four? Anscombe’s answer is that it is one action under several descriptions, and that it is intentional under some descriptions and not others, depending on what he knows and aims at. Her account of practical knowledge — the agent’s non-observational knowledge of what he is doing — and of the “practical syllogism” drew on Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. The book made “under a description” a philosophical idiom and set the agenda for the philosophy of action.

Modern Moral Philosophy

Her 1958 paper opened with three theses: that moral philosophy should be laid aside until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology; that the concepts of moral obligation and moral duty — of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of “ought” — should be jettisoned, being survivals of an earlier conception of ethics; and that the differences between English moral philosophers from Sidgwick onward are of little importance.

Her argument was historical. The special moral “ought” — “you ought, full stop” — made sense within a law conception of ethics, inherited from Judaism and Christianity, in which there is a divine legislator. Modern philosophers had abandoned the legislator but kept the concept of law, which was like keeping the notion of “criminal” after abolishing criminal law. Better to return to Aristotle, who spoke of virtues, of what is just or unjust, and of human flourishing. Here she named and attacked consequentialism, the view (which she found in all English moral philosophers since Sidgwick) that the rightness of an act depends only on its consequences; anyone who seriously thinks that it might be right, to avert some catastrophe, to execute an innocent man, “shows a corrupt mind” — “I do not want to argue with him”.

The paper, together with the work of her friends Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch, inaugurated the modern revival of virtue ethics, continued by Alasdair MacIntyre, Rosalind Hursthouse and many others.

Other work

Anscombe’s Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1959) remains a classic. Her paper “The First Person” (1975) argued, startlingly, that “I” is not a referring expression at all. “Causality and Determination” (1971) challenged the Humean view that causation is regular succession. In the philosophy of religion and ethics she defended the doctrine of double effect, the absolute prohibition on intentionally killing the innocent, and Catholic teaching on contraception.

In conversation

• “Why?” — the question that marks out intentional action.
• The man at the pump — one action under many descriptions.
• “Mr Truman’s Degree” — the deliberate killing of the innocent is murder.