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Professor Elisabeth Anscombe occupied the front and centre of English University Philosophy in a similar manner to the way in which Hannah Arendt did in the arena of Political Philosophy and the Philosophy of History in the US. The two figures were otherwise far from congruent. Arendt, for example, did not even consider herself a Philosopher, whereas Anscombe was probably the epitome of a professional Philosopher entrenched in the University System of England(Oxbridge). Arendt in her doctoral thesis wrote about St Augustine and the concept of Love. Anscombe is often regarded as belonging to the school of Analytical Thomism insofar as her Philosophy of Religion was concerned. We also know that her religious convictions permeated her life to an extent that we do not see in Arendt, the Political Scientist par excellence. Arendt, for example, was more fascinated by Rome than Athens. Both women, however were fascinated with the concept of evil in their respective ways. Arendt preferred to view the phenomenon in a worldly fashion, carefully charting the origins of Totalitarianism and the Minds of men like Eichmann. In so doing she arrives at the conclusion that the origin of evil lies in an inability to think about what one does. In the eyes of many this conclusion underestimated the scope and power of evil in the lives of human beings. Arendt’s possible counterargument to this criticism was to suggest that her critics did not fully understand the power of thought.
Anscombe was less worldly in her criticism of evil whether on a personal or collective level:
“The “preservation of democracy”, the possibility of free speech, and other such ideals which are valuable only as a means cannot weigh against considerations which belong to the essence of the moral law. The death of men, the curtailment of liberty, the destruction of property, the diminution of culture, the obscuring of judgement by passion and interest, the neglect of truth and charity, the decrease in belief and in the practice of religion–all these are the normal accompaniments of a war. We have, as we have seen, little enough hope of a just settlement to set against such prospects. And finally there is a widespread tendency to make what our country chooses to do, the criterion of what may be done, and to call this patriotism. So a war against totalitarianism produces a totalitarian tendency: not only are morals lowered, but the very theory of morals is corrupted”.
This is Anscombe at her most categorical and the above words parallel much of what Kant said about the less destructive wars of his time before the era of the warring Juggernaut’s defining the modern period. This is the Anscombe from Oxford, who objected courageously to the conferring of an honorary doctorate degree on President Truman( the man who gave the order to drop atomic bombs on civilian populations). In this objection we encounter also a categorical condemnation of the murder of innocent civilians. War, in her eyes, is no excuse for humans to act like animals. Humans have an obligation to fight, if they absolutely have no other choice, in accordance with rules and conventions(e.g. the Geneva Convention). Civilians shall be given the opportunity to surrender and not be forced to forfeit their lives because of an unfortunate circumstance of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Geneva Convention was an international agreement in the spirit of the kind of International Organisation Kant envisaged in his work on Universal History. It placed the onus for the protection of innocent civilians squarely upon the shoulders of aggressors. In this essay we find an appeal to the moral law which is absent in other essays. We will not, however, find any such appeal to Kantian moral law in Arendt for whom Eichmanns superficial claim that the maxims of his action were in accordance with the categorical imperative sufficed, as far as she was concerned, to cast a shadow over Kant’s moral Philosophy.
Arendt is the existential pragmatist, and Anscombe is difficult to classify given the above Kantian characterisation of the evils of war and obvious Aristotelian tendencies in other essays on the topic of Human Life. Her reflections upon Philosophical Psychology are more Wittgensteinian than Kantian but as we have argued in earlier volumes, these kind of reflections reject dualist and materialist assumptions: a rejection which both Aristotle and Kant agreed upon. Anscombe’s ethical reflections are in fact more Aristotelian than Kantian but they also embody a Wittgensteinian commitment to analysing language usage: a commitment that was probably necessary to clear away the weeds of dualism and materialism in modern ethical Philosophy. Kant, we have argued earlier, was skeptical about turning to language as a court of justification for theories relating to belief and action, claiming as he did that even if it is true that we share the language we speak together, it is nevertheless also true that we can use this language both rationally and irrationally.
One of the differentiating factors serving to distinguish Arendt, the pragmatic existentialist from Anscombe, the follower of Wittgenstein, is Anscombe’s schooling in Analytic Philosophy. Her years in Cambridge placed her in the anti-Hegelian environment nurtured by Russell and Moore. Dialectical reasoning and its tendency to relativise truth and knowledge were anathema to the Cambridge school of Analytical Philosophy. Anscombe points to the possible origin of Hegelian anti-Critical Philosophy in an Ancient medieval thought. She invokes Plato:
“I cant help thinking that the Platonic substance, the idea or Form, is of importance in the tradition whereby intellect came to be thought of as immaterial substance. For that which could grasp those immaterial beings, the Forms, had itself to be immaterial: the soul, Plato said, is akin to the Forms”.(Human Life, Action, and Ethics, Exeter, Imprint Academic, 2005, P.4)
Anscombe also refers to an ancient argument which claims the soul to be immaterial on the grounds that thought is not an act performed by any physical or bodily organ. Given that thought must logically be an activity, it must therefore be the act of some immaterial substance. Descartes, in his second meditation, constructs his dualistic position by firstly maintaining that nutrition, locomotion and perception are properties of the soul and secondly by detaching thought and sensation from the body. Anscombe claims paradoxically that this position has its roots in Aristotelian thought but it is not clear what she means here, especially considering the fact that she concludes this reflection by maintaining that nutrition, locomotion, and perception are partially constitutive of forms of life possessing constellations of organs that are responsible for those forms of life.
Anscombe claims that Descartes is performing a “trick”. We have argued in previous volumes that “the new men” of Philosophy worked systematically and manipulatively to redirect the thread of philosophical tradition that flowed from the thought of the Greeks. Analytical Philosophy, Anscombe argues, responds to Cartesian dualism with the Hobbesian strategy of reducing the substance or principle of thought to physical substance: the only substance that can be observed and physically manipulated. The organ of the brain is postulated as the bodily part that acts in order to produce sensation, thought, and understanding: thus embedding life forms inextricably in a causal network of events of type cause, and events of type effect, that are logically distinguishable from each other.
Anscombe charts the course of spirituality with the help of an examination of the grammatical structures of first person present indicatives. She claims that Descartes spiritualised the soul and helped to separate it philosophically from its physical origins. This, (even though Anscombe does not actively recognise it to be such), is an Aristotelian hylomorphic criticism of Cartesianism that is designed to reject the assumptions of both dualism and materialism. Descartes and Hobbes together neutralised Aristotelian hylomorphism and metaphysics, and revived the fruitless debate between the dualists and materialists. Kant would in his reflections once again bury this debate in Aristotelian spirit. Hegel and Science aided and abetted by some forms of analytical philosophy again revived these debates but in turn faced opposition by the later Philosophy of Wittgenstein and Anscombe. The resultant view of Philosophical Psychology made ethical argumentation of the kind we encountered in Anscombe’s remarks in her essay on the Justice of War, almost impossible.
In her work entitled “Intention” Anscombe maintains that categorical ethics had previously been tied to the authority of religion and its philosophical importance waned with the waning of this authority. The categorical justification of ethics thus became problematic. There is, however, no attempt to relate her reflections to Kantian critical Philosophy, whether it be ethical or in terms of the founding idea of freedom. This idea is a difficult idea to assimilate in religious discourse because it belongs more naturally in a context of the tribunal constructed by ones peers on the basis of Law, truthfulness and rationality. Moreover this tribunal has a purely humanistic history, having been constructed by generations of great-souled leaders and philosophers.
Anscombe appears to agree with Wittgenstein in his belief that the only necessity that can be gleaned from practical reasoning is a form of necessity manifested in grammatical propositions. This retreat from the rationalistic tribunal of justification is partly a result of the conflation of an anti-Hegelian critique that placed Kantian and Hegelian Philosophy within the same pair of brackets under the concept of “Continental Philosophy”. Anscombe does, however point out an interesting aspect of practical reasoning in the following quote:
“Necessity here has a sense little examined by philosophers, but given by Aristotle in his dictionary Metaphysics(delta). Things are, in this sense necessary when without them some good cannot be got or some evil avoided. The pilot must navigate to preserve his ship: the cook must put salt in the potatoes to cook them well: A very likely must know what is just and unjust for him to do if he is to avoid acting unjustly..”(Ethics, Religion, and Politics(Oxford, Blackwell, 1981, P.9)
This account of Aristotle is also congruent with the opening passage of his Nichomachean Ethics in which it is claimed that every activity of man including science and all areas of knowledge must(of necessity)aim at the good. Anscombe’s reference to Aristotle’s Metaphysics does not elaborate upon the assumption that the activity of practical reasoning is the activity of a rational animal capable of discourse. Neither does it emphasise or highlight the hylomorphic assumptions that found Aristotle’s reflections, namely, that the Theory of Forms has been replaced by a Theory of Change which rejects the dualistic thesis that the existence of forms exists in an independent reality which empirical reality “participates” in. The Theory of change categorically states that the form or principle of all forms of change emanating from psuche is “in” the organism and explains both what this organism essentially does and essentially is. The knowledge of this change is the concern of the different sciences which explain and justify the necessity and universality involved in the activity of the organism and the forms or principles guiding this activity. The practical necessity Anscombe discusses above is related to the formal and final causes of hylomorphic theory. The concept of “form of life” does not however figure centrally in her ethical and political discussions. Anscombe is neither a materialist nor a behaviourist as is evident in her defence of Wittgenstein against such charges. Wittgenstein’s Philosophy also avoids dualistic and Hegelian tendencies with the aid of an Aristotelian idea, namely, “forms of life”. The only space in Wittgenstein’s account of activity(e.g. the ostensive definition of a concept) for the Hegelian idea of “Spirit” is the spirit in which any activity is done. Aristotle would argue, however, as Wittgenstein does not, that ways of acting relate to principles that regulate the particularity of different forms of life. For Aristotle the human form of life is related in an important way to the communication of principles or forms from human to human. These types of activity carry with it the responsibility for the communication of the so called “basic terms” of any universe of discourse, e.g., the theoretical, practical and productive sciences. Anscombe’s work on “intention” and her account of intentional action is in the “spirit” of Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory, broadening as it does the idea of causality traditionally embraced by Analytical Philosophy. This spirit is manifested in her remarks on History:
“Let us end by considering the causalities especially involved in a history of a people’s dealings with one another. When such dealings concern or constitute great events, important in the history of nations, they are the greater part of what we call “History”, where this is treated as the name of a subject of traditional lore and of academic study, a special discipline. But public or private, great events or small, the causalities involved in them are much the same type. The first thing to note is : these causalities are mostly to be understood derivatively. The derivation is from the understanding of action as intentional, calculated, voluntary, impulsive, involuntary, reluctant, concessive, passionate etc. The first thing we know upon the whole, is what proceedings are parleys, agreements, quarrels, struggles, embassies, wars, pressures, pursuits of given ends, routines, institutional practices of all sorts. That is to say: in our descriptions of their histories, we apply such conceptions of what people are engaged in…..Given the idea of an engagement to marry, say, you can look for its causal antecedents…”(Human Life, P.107)
There is much to unpack in the above quote. History, as an academic discipline, at some point in its development was presented in mythological form. Muthos for the Greeks retained important connections to aletheia and logos. Given the fact that mythology reached back to the origins of the universe and civilisation it was necessarily speculative and required an allegorical mode of discourse that applied concepts symbolically(requiring “interpretation by the discipline of “hermeneutics”– of the kind practiced by Paul Ricouer).There was undoubtedly an intention to present the truth of these matters in the form of a true account . Aristotle’s hylomorphic philosophy certainly assisted in the transformation of this symbolic allegorical mode of logos to a more descriptively oriented categorical mode of discourse. Anscombe’s logos of intentional action provides us with a conceptual network that is not designed explicitly with hylomorphic philosophy in mind but this approach does in fact chart some of the collateral territory of this domain of discourse.
History as a discipline also received some assistance in its transformation into an academic discipline from Kant’s Metaphysical theory. Kant distinguished between Theoretical Reasoning where events are categorised for example into events of type cause, and events of type effect. Kant in fact focussed on a theoretical view of causation very different to the Humean linear account where investigators follow chains of linear causes and effects. Kant’s theoretical search for the totality of conditions for any given phenomenon is instead, related to a logical principle of sufficient reason: a principle which acknowledged the reality of multi-factorial causation arranged in a network of conditions. Kant’s account, in other words, aligned itself very closely with Aristotelian accounts of causation and probably also aligned itself with the separation of scientific discourse into the domains of Theoretical Science, Practical Science, and Productive Science.
Consequently, in historical accounts, we might encounter a search for conditions that reach back into the mists of time where the forms discerned are given substance by the wisdom of muthos. In such investigations we might also encounter descriptions made in the “spirit”, or in accordance with the principle of “freedom”, where the chain of explanation ends in a voluntary intentional choice of a historical actor or an institution. Kant pointed out that the broad texture of reality is such that one can conceptualise (describe/explain) the same phenomenon in both theoretical and practical terms. In the former we categorise the phenomenon as an event that has happened, in the latter we practically categorise the phenomenon in question in terms of Action. Anscombe’s theory of Action assists in the construction of this practical characterisation: a theory that neither Aristotle nor Kant would fundamentally disagree with. Nevertheless we will not find in Anscombe any explicit commitment to the Metaphysics we find in either Aristotelian or Kantian theory. Anscombe, in her Introduction to the series of essays published under the title “Ethics, Religion, and Politics”, raises an interesting doubt about her own approach in these essays:
“So far as general questions of moral theory have interested me, I have thought them closely tied up with problems of action-description and unsettlable without help from Philosophy of Mind. Some of these papers represent a struggle to treat all deliberate action as a matter of acting on a calculation how to obtain ones ends. I have now become rather doubtful about this.”(Page IX)
Her doubt most likely had its origins in her study of Aristotelian Philosophical Psychology rather than that presented in Kant’s Practical works. Even if this is the case there is nevertheless no explicit commitment to the Aristotelian Theory of Change and Theory of “Psuche”. Indeed in her volume entitled “From Parmenides to Wittgenstein” Aristotle is discussed extensively in relation to specific aporetic problems in Philosophy but without acknowledgement of the importance of the metaphysical network of kinds of change, principles of change and causes of change embedded in the Theoretical, Practical, and Productive Sciences. The Practical sciences are of course connected to Action as conceived of by Aristotle, namely fundamentally connected to the telos or final cause(explanation) of “The Good”. This is reflected in Aristotle’s claim that the premises of a practical argument show or prove why the action is Good(Anscombe Human Life, P.114). The major premise in arguments used in accordance with the kind of practical reasoning we encounter in the practical sciences will be more than merely a starting point(as Anscombe mysteriously suggests): rather the major premise will play the role of a principle or justification. In the ethical case, for Kant, the major premise will assume the practical truth and validity of the moral law. If, for example, the major premise or principle/justification is “Promises ought to be kept” and is amongst the totality of Kantian conditions which the principle of sufficient reason is seeking, the justification of the major premise will require support from the three formulations of the categorical imperative. The role of rational ideas such as “Freedom” and “The Good Will” in this type of propositional investigation will also be involved in various ways in tribunals of justification related to the major premise, “Promises ought to be kept”.
The epistemic component of Action is often characterised in Analytical Philosophy in terms of “belief”. Anscombe, however, does not fall into the camp of those analytical philosophers who seek to psychologise the concept of belief:
“Belief is the most difficult topic because it is so hard to hold in view and correctly combine the psychological and logical aspects. Beliefs are psychological dispositions belonging in the histories of minds. But also, a belief, a believing is internally characterised by the proposition saying what is believed. This is (mostly) not about anything psychological, its meaning and truth are not matters of which we should give a psychological account.”(Human Life, P.138)
Indeed not, for such a psychological account would fail to explain the role of good will and freedom in contexts of ethical justification. Objects of belief are of theoretical rather than practical concern and require a shift in the kind of justification required. This shift in turn is related to what Ricoeur referred to as the difference between archeological and teleological justifications(a distinction that in turn relies on different kinds of explanation).
Anscombe, in an essay entitled “Practical Inference” fixates upon the distinction between the objective and subjective elements of belief in a discussion of the expression “I want”. She claims correctly that this expression could never serve as a “good reason” because reasons, or the propositions expressing them, in practical inference connect not with psychological dispositions but rather with other propositions or reasons(P.144). The drive toward an end is the psychological aspect of the will. This drive or power is not an isolated element but is rather part of an integrated medley of other powers and dispositions involved in the process of of achieving the good ends of a good will. Such good will manifests itself in the action or actions necessary to bring about the end desired by the agent concerned. The “I will” is universalised by O Shaughnessy into “The Will”. In ethical contexts such actions are driven by practical rationality or practical knowledge of “The Good”. Necessity is involved in the form of the categorical imperatives that of necessity leads to doing what one ought to do in the name of areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time), which in its turn requires practical knowledge(including knowledge of the categorical imperative in at least one of its formulations). We argued earlier that ethical actions have several levels of characterisation that range from a descriptive level of making a promise, to an explanatory level of Principle(Promises ought to be kept) to the even higher level of the moral law that Justifies(Metaphysically and Logically) everything involved with the action and its object or achieved purpose. The Greek term Phronesis in such contexts is connected with the term “Sophia”–the theoretical rational part of the mind. This former aspect of the mind “counsels” the practical rationally aspect in relation to what ought to be done or chosen to be done and also in relation to the means to do what ought to be done. Phronesis is of course connected to the moral virtues of the great souled man and Sophia is connected to the intellectual virtues of such men who love both the good and knowledge.
Anscombe praises Aristotle for being the first to formulate the concept of Practical Truth which obviously is an important part of the above discussion. She refers to Aristotle claim that desire and choice is for the end of eudaimonia, and this requires the coordination of thought and desire(manifested especially in the disposition of decision making and deliberation)(P.152). She also acknowledges that Aristotle may be talking about “the will” in this discussion. In relation to this point she maintains:
“There is this special kind of cause operating in the world, and it is man” (P.153)
Desire, then, is a desire for both Sophia(wise understanding), an intellectual virtue, and phronesis, a moral virtue, both of which, according to Aristotle is necessary for a contemplative flourishing life(eudaimonia). Any action which is practically true, according to Anscombe must be in accordance with the description of what is involved in leading a flourishing life, something that can only occur in relation to a deliberative process of practical reasoning. This process of practical reasoning, for Aristotle will contain at least one major premise expressing a principle of action, e.g. “Promises ought to be kept”, “justice ought to be done”. Just as, in the latter case it is “The Law” that finally justifies that justice is done, so, in the former case, it is(according to Kant), the moral Law of the Categorical Imperative(in its three formulations) that justifies the principle “Promises ought to be kept”.
According to Anscombe, Moral Philosophy in Modern Times has been tainted by the collapse of the belief in religious authority. She discusses the uncomfortable relation that “moral earnestness”(as she expresses it) has to Religious and Secular authority:
“If you really want to corrupt people by direct teaching of ideas, moral earnestness would, in fact, be an important item of equipment. But I should also suspect that direct teaching of ideas is not, nowadays, the best way of setting about changing people:public action is much more effective. A good deal was done, for example, by arranging trials of war criminals on the bad side with judges from the good and victorious side making up their law as they went: this educated people out of old fashioned over-legalistic conceptions of justice….”(P.162)
Aristotle once said that his lectures on Ethics were not for those of the followers of his lectures under 30 years of age, because presumably their moral characters were not amenable to the moral actualisation process: a process involving the coordination of a number of practical and intellectual dispositions. Yet we found Socrates teaching geometry to a young slave. If that teaching had continued systematically no doubt the slave would have become a geometer. For Plato this was an awakening of forms within the slave. Aristotle, however would have described this differently as a matter of the transmission of principles or forms from the mind of the teacher to the mind of the student, thus contributing to the actualisation process that will assist in the formation of the slaves character.
This hylomorphic idea of being responsible for ones deliberations, decisions, and actions began to wane as the “new men” with their “new understanding” of Justice and The Good began to influence Modern Society. Hannah Arendt’s analysis of our modern human condition pointed to a division in society between those “new men” who thought “everything is possible!” and those who felt that “Nothing was possible”. Both of those groups were expressions of the fact that the moral responsibility as conceived of by Greek Philosophy and Kantian Enlightenment Philosophy was eclipsed by a sociological view of causal networks that made man an instrumental manipulator or victim of these networks. Powering ones path through these networks like a Juggernaut seemed, in such circumstances, to be the only rational response to the challenges of the times.
Anscombe invokes a legal tribunal as holding out the last hope of defending the ancient idea of Responsibility and Good Judgement. For many, in a rapidly changing world with constantly changing conditions and standards, the only reasonable response was to create ones own standards, become a law unto oneself. Anscombe’s response to our modern malaise is the surprising claim that nothing can be done to restore the moral concept of Responsibility, because:
“.. it is not profitable for us as present to do moral philosophy: this should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking…the concepts of obligation and duty–moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say–and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense and “ought”, ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible: because they are survivals, or derivatives from survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives…”(P.169)
Anscombe raises a question in relation to Aristotelian ethics, asking why Aristotle does not discuss ethical Responsibility and Obligation. In the context of this discussion she also reduces the Kantian architectonic to what she describes as “legislating for oneself”. She then attacks the universalisation aspect of the categorical imperative in the following way:
“His rule about universalisable maxims is useless without stipulations as to what shall count as a relevant description of an action with a view to constructing a maxim about it.”(P.171)
Firstly, it is not clear that the maxim is related to the description in the way Anscombe assumes. The polarity of the relation may in fact be reversed and the maxim or principle give rise to determining the appropriate description of the action. It is also unclear why the universalising of the description of a particular promise being made(in the minor premise of the moral argument) cannot be conceptually related to the universalisation contained in the major premise of the argument, namely “Promises ought to be kept”. The above reflection by Anscombe is puzzling in the light of her earlier comments on the topic of practical truth. If Anscombe is correct in her doubt about the universalisation of the minor premise in the following moral argument:
“Promises ought to be kept”
Jack promised Jill he would pay the money back that he borrowed from her
Therefore Jack ought to pay the money back to her”
..then the above argument would not be expressing what she earlier referred to as “Practical Truth”. Anscombe continues to reflect upon Kantian theory and discusses the question of whether lying is absolutely forbidden on Kant’s theory. Should, for example, one be truthful with a murderer and tell him upon being asked where the person he is pursuing is hiding?. This example is a curious one and almost appears to be constructed for the purposes of refuting the categorical imperative. Firstly, one can wonder how one knows in this case that we are being confronted by a murderer? Secondly, why should we accept that there are only two possible choices of action in such circumstances? Would it be contrary to the categorical imperative to say nothing in response to the question or to answer in a language the murderer does not understand(asking for example why the inquirer wants the information requested). If it is argued that one ought to reveal the information because one is under threat or duress to do so, then the choice is no longer a free choice. In such circumstances, even if I reveal the information requested under duress and the murderer finds his quarry. Is a murder the inevitable result? What if the potential victim incapacitates the murderer in the ensuing struggle or even kills the murderer. Shall I be held responsible for the death that ensues? Or is it rather the case, as Kant maintains, that the cause of the evil in this imagined situation is the agent and the maxims behind his action. The belief that my providing someone with information is part of the causal network leading to the murder is a correct belief but it does not mitigate the murderers absolute responsibility for the action he wills. The form of explanation for this state of affairs does not divide the world up into causes and effects but rather seeks for a totality of conditions regulated by the principle of sufficient reason. The will is not a cause that is conceptually independent of events conceived of as “effects”.
On the accounts of both Aristotle and Kant the murderer makes his choices and ought to be held responsible for them. If I am blamed for revealing the deadly information surely the only grounds for such an accusation could be “You could have said nothing!”. Such an accusation is not either in the case of law or morality a matter of accusing me of being an accessory before the fact but is rather an accusation of a lack of prudence on my part. The principle of prudence for both Aristotle and Kant was a power that emanated from the calculating part of our minds rather than a power of categorical deliberation on the part of a will regulated by a principle of sufficient reason.
Anscombe accuses Kant of not being aware of a hylomorphic distinction that is made in the description of the action of a murder. She cites a case in which one believes one is shooting a deer that one has been hunting but in reality one shoots ones own father. She refers to two kinds of object here, the formal object of the deer and the material object of ones father. It is difficult to imagine that Kant would not have been aware of a distinction that 99 out of 100 courts of the time would have recognised and would lie behind the obvious judgement that the agent did not intend to kill his father and was therefore not guilty of murder. In such circumstances there may also be an investigation into whether the shooter took all the relevant precautions associated with the responsibilities of hunting and some other crime may well be judged to have occurred. It is important to realise that the mere accusation of the crime of “murder” does not suffice to categorically conceptualise the event described above as “Murder”. Anscombe claims that the only description that best answers the question as to what was occurring in these circumstances is “X shot his father”–this being the material object of the act. Does the verdict of morality and the courts mean nothing then? Surely after the post mortem tribunal has occurred and the verdict of “accidental death” is delivered , this is also a permissible answer to the question “What happened? If the case goes to court and the son is found not guilty of murder, surely we can say “Yes, the son shot his father, but unintentionally.” This is not to deny the validity of the third person observational judgement “He shot his father”. He did not will to do that from a first person point of view but the observational judgment is true as is the judgement “He thought he was shooting the deer he was hunting”. Anscombe admits that the deer is the “formal object”. It is not clear whether she is conscious of the hylemorphic implications of the choice of this term “formal”. Formal explanations or “causes” for Aristotle take us closer to rational essence specifying definitions than material causes or explanations: that is they take us closer to answering the question “Why did he shoot his father?”: “Because he thought he was shooting the deer he was hunting.” In this later shift we must see that involved in this movement is a move from a context of exploration/discovery to a context of explanation/justification. A further move within the context of Justification might occur if the defendant in this case claimed “I would never intentionally shoot the father that I love”. The Categorical imperative is not operating at the conceptual level of the context of exploration in which one is deciding how to conceptualise a particular action. Once the action has been conceptualised, only then can we judge as to the goodness or otherwise of the action: this is an essential condition for the attribution of responsibility which presupposes the action was blameworthy or praiseworthy.
Anscombe appears to be conflating what is prudent with what is ethical especially when she discusses the very intellectual idea of Truth we find in Hume, which she claims can be expressed as follows:
“Truth consists in either relations of ideas , as that 20 shillings=one pound or matter of fact as that I ordered potatoes, you supplied them, and you sent me a bill. So it doesnt apply to such a proposition as that I owe you such ad such a sum.”(Ethics, Politics, and Religion. P.22)
It is nevertheless possible that the above relation(expressed by the above facts) which I have established with my grocer is sufficient to constitute a promise to pay the bill. Anscombe, dos not however discuss the concept of promising but prefers to focus upon whether “brute facts” in the above quote are sufficient to justify the description “X owes Y so much money”. The discussion occurs solely in the context of a limited concept of truth as is evident from the assertion that truth does not apply to any proposition claiming that one owes someone money. She does however discuss the injustice of not paying what one owes and insists that a conceptual analysis of this situation must precede any ethical discussion–a conceptual analysis involving “philosophical psychology”. She claims that the “should” or “ought” related to ones need for potatoes are not to be construed in a moral sense. She further claims, somewhat paradoxically, that not paying what one owes has become associated with a moral sense of duty or obligation which in turn was determined by a law conception of ethics propagated by the influence of the Hebrew Torah upon Christianity.
Anscombe suggests that the concept of hamartia was used by Aristotle to refer to a tragic flaw in the heroes of Greek Tragedies. This concept of hamartia, according to Paul Ricoeur, was re-conceptualised by the Christians as “sin” which in turn became associated with the internal feeling of guilt that lies at the source of the activity of religious confession. One is guilty because one has sinned. Here we find ourselves at the end of a cycle of experience which expressed itself in Greek tragedy in the form of an objective tragic mistake(hamartia).
We have discussed several times previously the influence of the Latinisation of Greek terms in the translation process from Greek to Latin. What the Christian and Greek muthos have in common is that the term hamartia appears to be applicable in the domain of religious experience and both cultures would probably accept that the meaning of this term in a religious context is that of a rupturing of the bond between man and what he finds sacred. The Greeks refused to interiorise this objective state of affairs and preferred to exhibit the phenomenon in the spirit of aletheia(truth, unconcealment) on a public stage. For the Greeks the law that had been breached was not merely a private affair between oneself and ones God but rather something to be manifested in a public arena in a context of catharsis in which both pity and fear are encapsulated in a larger context of understanding. The Roman militaristic conception of “Law” was probably also present in the mistranslation of hamartia as “mistake” although this meaning was undoubtedly present in Greek usage prior to its philosophical/poetic transformation into a concept relevant to the ethical and religious idea of “The Good”(which has a categorical meaning not possessed by the more hypothetical meaning of “mistake”). What we witness in such a change is a transformation from something that was mythologically sacred to something that becomes philosophically “sacred” where the focus is on the good of a mans character and its relation to eudaimonia. The conception of law shifted from a divine context into a more humanistic context in which the good became embodied in great souled men such as Solon, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. All of these figures were involved in the very real and pragmatic world of the polis and its manifestly secular injustices. Solon’s laws were designed to prevent the rich from exploiting the poor and the poor from robbing the rich. Solon was convinced that both parties would benefit from obeying his laws. They definitely emerged from a context of pity and fear but transcended this context by a context of justification, a context that would prove to be critical to the survival of the polis. Yet it is only with Aristotle that this bond between man and the sacred appear to be restored via a view of the polis that was less calculative and more philosophical: a view of the great souled man who valued Philosophy, Science, and the contemplative life.
Anscombe continues her discussion in terms of a critique of the is-ought question insofar as it relates to her earlier discussion of “need”. She fixates upon the concept of “what-is- good-for” which is somewhat puzzling considering Glaucons challenge in the Republic to provide a theory of the good that is both good-in-itself and good-in-its-consequences. The constellation of the focus on the facts and consequences also evokes the Humean concept of causality and its matrix of events of type cause and events of type effect: a matrix that destroys the unity of the actions involved in an ethical activity. Anscombe also specifically argues that the transition from is to ought on her account does not carry what she calls the “mesmeric force” of a verdict of a tribunal which in its turn requires the presence of an attitude toward something that resembles “the sacred”(implied by divine law). By implication, her argument involves the claim that there is no longer any respect for the law of the kind we could find during the times and eras of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. One might, of course, argue that the respect we find in all three of the above philosophers is connected to divine law through their different philosophical conceptions of the divine and this might sustain Ansombe’s objection. There is however a distinct atmosphere of secularisation in the Hylomorphic “Scientific” Philosophy of Aristotle. In Aristotle’s work we encounter God technically represented as a “Primary Form” in a context of contemplation that regards knowledge as a kind of “holy ground”. A very different conception to that superior being created by the fiery imaginations of poets and priests.
Respect for “forms” or “principles” is the focus of Kantian Enlightenment Thought. The tribunal of reason resembles the proceedings of a court of law in which divine beings are conspicuous by their absence. Anscombe misses this relation of morality into law in her reflections on Kantian moral Philosophy. Both arenas of human activity share common attitudes–respect for the law, respect for the moral law–and share common objects, e.g. respect for evidence and the due process of argumentation. Respect for the rights of both contesting parties is the political attitude that relates to both kinds of process. Confessions in such circumstances are less sensible objects of pity and fear and more rational objects of decisive evidence contributing to a correct verdict of the tribunal. The giving of evidence in court is inextricably linked to the Kantian conception of promising–“I promise to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God” but also linked to an emotional nexus connected to deus absconditus. Swearing an oath with ones hand on the Bible testifies to the symbolic presence of the divine in the tribunal. Such tribunals, however, have more in common with the secular trial of Socrates and the great-souled law makers of the polis than with the figures and processes haunting the Temples of the time.
Anscombe praises Hume for his jettisoning of the moral ought from ethical discussion on the grounds that without divine support, law does not have the required psychological effect. Aristotle is cited as an example of a Philosopher who did not appeal to any divine influence but was able nevertheless to establish the authority of his forms and principles via processes of argumentation. It can indeed also be argued that Aristotle transformed the dialogical presentation of Socratic Elenchus we encounter in the Platonic dialogues into exercises of logic requiring only very abstract tribunals of reasoning in which The Good was expressed in terms of Laws embedded in a system of ought premises. Anscombes invocation of Hume(one of “the new men” of the modern era) actually reduces the force of the meaning of the term, “law”(to bind someone), and the social bond of the law to the more popular notion of a rule which carries no force of an imperative to command obedience. Rather, the rule hypothetically “counsels” that if you wish to drive to Cambridge you ought to follow the direction of the arrow–thus leaving it up to you to change your mind and drive to Oxford instead. Aristotle would not have accepted such a utilitarian conflation of rules with laws. On his account if you do not accept the major ought premise of a moral argument you risk being regarded as irrational. He would have been dumbfounded by our modern tendency to use is-arguments( people contradict themselves in discourse) to undermine the logical force of ought arguments(One ought not to contradict oneself in ones discourse). In moral contexts virtues are related to ought premises that express principles of justice. The argument of Glaucon that laws are only obeyed because man is afraid of the consequences and that an invisible ring would justify all forms of illegal behaviour would have been viewed with contempt by Aristotle(as it was similarly viewed by both Socrates and Plato).
Kant has a similar view to Aristotle of the law-like nature of moral ought statements. He expresses this in his discussion of Promising, an account that cannot be undermined by the simplistic argument that promises as a matter of fact are not kept. A broken promise for Kant is perhaps the most important occasion for the use of the major premise or principle”Promises ought to be kept”. If confronted with the philosophical question “Why?”, the answer would contain reference to one or more of the formulations of the moral law. A promise broken in such a context of justification cannot affect or change the form or principle expressed by the true proposition “Promises ought to be kept”. On the other hand the keeping of the promise not only brings about the truth that promises are kept but also brings good into the world. These are two of the reasons why promising has been one of the building blocks of our civilisations and why we still promise to tell the truth via the oath we take in the court room. Reducing promises to the consequentialist quid pro quo world of the contract is a transactional move that neither Aristotle or Kant would have approved of. The contract at is very best has a role in the tribunal of justification as evidence that a promise was made and such evidence presupposes the philosophical meaning of the principle.
Anscombe claims that ethics must rest upon a theory of Philosophical Psychology that explains the psychological aspects of action. It is not, however clear whether she realises that such an account of ethical action is only a part of the totality of conditions Kant is in search of in the name of the logical principles of sufficient reason and noncontradiction.
We do not find any account of the binding force of the law in Anscombes theories: the law does not appear to bind agents to an action or indeed does not appear to be a bond that one is “duty-bound” to honour. Her reading of Kant in this context is problematic:
“Kant’s major influence has been that of emphasising the motive of duty…..what ought to be done or ought not to be done is somehow derivable from the categorical imperative, “Always act so that you can consistently universalise the maxim on which you act”, …..It leads to a contrast between doing something for the motive of duty and doing it with enjoyment—the more you like doing something , the less of a purely moral agent you are”(P.195)
This is a very poor interpretation of the complexity of Kant’s moral theory, which quite clearly, in the name of a summum bonum, relates the happiness of the flourishing life to the worthiness of a virtuous agent who does feel compelled by areté and phronesis to do what he ought to do(his duty). The agent does this freely as if he were a legislator in a kingdom of ends. This account accords well with the Aristotelian account. Indeed all the virtues require the use of reason in the mode of the “ought” and there is no contradiction in the phenomenon of a man gladly doing what he ought to do (neither in Aristotle nor in Kant).
In conclusion , Anscombe in many respects manifests in her writings many aspects of Aristotelian hylomorphic Philosophy and it may be that her criticisms of Kant rest upon a misunderstanding of the nature of the close relation between hylomorphic and critical philosophy. Anscombe may well be a victim of her fascination for the empiricism of Hume and as a consequence she fails to see the power of the rationalism we find in both Aristotle and Kant. Wittgenstein never produced a moral theory so we do not know whether any theory of his would have sought to emulate Anscombes desire to cleanse ethical theory of the moral “ought”. In this desire she identifies herself with all “the new men” of philosophy since Descartes.
Following these new men is tantamount to following Ariadne’s thread bak into the cave of the Minotaur where the population of the cave is divided in accordance with Arendt’s principle division into those for whom everything is possible and those for whom nothing is possible.