Anscombe's Modern Moral Philosophy: Obligation, Action, and Virtue

If someone says that an action is "morally wrong," what has that phrase added? They may already have described the action as dishonest, cruel, or unjust. The additional verdict can sound like the announcement of a law that binds regardless of anyone's wishes. G.E.M. Anscombe asks what gives that particular use of moral language its sense.

Her essay "Modern Moral Philosophy," published in Philosophy in January 1958, challenges the continued use of obligation language after the loss of its earlier framework. But that challenge is only one part of the paper. She also calls for a better account of action and intention, and criticizes a way of judging actions that makes their consequences decisive.

Reading the essay through those connected concerns prevents a misleading summary. Anscombe does not simply replace rules with admirable character traits. She asks what actions are, how we describe them, and what would explain the relationship between virtue and human flourishing. Her proposed redirection leaves substantial philosophical work to do.

Anscombe opens with three theses. First, she proposes setting moral philosophy aside until there is an adequate philosophy of psychology. Second, she recommends abandoning the special moral concepts of obligation, duty, right and wrong, and moral "ought," if doing so is psychologically possible. Third, she says the differences between the well-known English moral philosophers from Sidgwick onward are of little importance.

The last claim is deliberately sweeping. Its point is not that these philosophers use identical arguments or agree about every action. Anscombe thinks a shared development in their treatment of responsibility and consequences matters more than their differences. A reader needs to examine that specific criticism before accepting her verdict on the tradition.

Likewise, her first thesis does not say that we should wait for a laboratory discovery before thinking about conduct. The missing psychology includes conceptual questions about action, intention, wanting, and pleasure. Without an adequate account of these, a theory can use familiar words while failing to explain what its evaluations concern.

These theses constrain the positive interpretation of the essay. If the conceptual groundwork is still missing, it would be inconsistent to present the paper as a completed alternative ethical system. Anscombe supplies criticisms, examples, and a direction of inquiry; she does not finish the account she asks for.

Anscombe distinguishes ordinary uses of "ought" from a special moral use. A machine ought to be oiled if it needs oil to run properly. A plant needs conditions in which it can grow. Such statements connect what is needed with an activity or a kind of thing.

The moral use she targets carries a different emphasis. It presents something like an absolute verdict of guilty or not guilty concerning an action. This is the sense she connects with obligation and law. It is therefore inaccurate to read her as proposing the elimination of every sentence containing "should" or "ought."

As an original illustration, someone might say that a musician ought to slow down while learning a difficult passage. The advice connects a proposed action with learning to play accurately. That statement does not automatically claim the special law-like authority Anscombe is criticizing.

Keeping the uses separate also answers a simple apparent contradiction. Her recommendation that philosophers ought to change their vocabulary need not employ the very special moral sense she proposes abandoning. A recommendation about how to conduct inquiry can be intelligible without asserting a divine-law verdict.

Anscombe argues that the vocabulary of moral obligation became established through a law conception of ethics. Within that conception, what conduct requires is understood through divine law. She discusses the historical place of Judaism and Christianity and also notes the Stoics' divine-law conception.

The qualification matters. Her genealogy should not be reduced to the claim that Christianity invented every ethical requirement. Nor is she claiming that Aristotle had no account of wrongdoing, blame, or justice. Her comparison concerns the place and force of the specifically modern moral vocabulary.

She thinks that vocabulary can survive after its framework has been abandoned. Her analogy is a society retaining the notion of criminality after criminal law and courts have disappeared. A word may keep an emphatic role even though the institutions that once made its use intelligible are gone.

The analogy is part of an argument, not historical evidence that an actual society abolished its courts and kept criminal convictions. Its purpose is to make the claimed conceptual displacement easier to understand. Whether moral obligation has really undergone a comparable displacement remains a question to assess.

Her diagnosis is also more specific than saying that words become meaningless whenever their origins are forgotten. The claim is that this particular use depends on a framework that the later theorist has failed to supply. A defense of secular obligation would need to explain its present authority rather than merely point out that the vocabulary remains familiar.

A possible objection is that concepts can acquire new uses. Even if a vocabulary once belonged to divine law, that history alone would not prove that no coherent secular use is possible. The objection separates the origin of a concept from the grounds of its present application.

A secular account might appeal to rational agency or to relations of accountability between people. These are possible directions for answering Anscombe, rather than positions established by naming them. The account would have to explain the authority of a requirement and whether it preserves or changes the sense she is criticizing.

Anscombe herself criticizes the idea of legislating for oneself in her discussion of Kant. She thinks the idea of legislation requires a relation that cannot simply be reproduced by an individual announcing a requirement to themselves. Assessing that criticism requires assessing her reading of Kant, not treating the label "self-legislation" as an obvious contradiction.

The general challenge is therefore substantive. What makes a requirement binding, and what are we claiming when we call it an obligation? Neither the persistence of a word nor the story of its origin automatically supplies the answer.

This discussion also does not establish that people without religious belief cannot act justly. A claim about the intelligibility of one philosophical vocabulary is different from a claim about the conduct of every person who uses it. The essay's argument should be tested at the level at which it is offered.

Anscombe repeatedly asks how an action is being described. The same event can fall under different descriptions, and an ethical theory needs to identify which descriptions are relevant. Simply supplying a test for "an action" leaves a problem if the content of the action has not been specified.

She raises this concern in criticizing both Kant and Mill. Her objection is that their proposed methods require an account of the descriptions under which an action is considered. Without that account, the same conduct can appear under descriptions that lead the method in different directions.

Consider an original hypothetical example. A person transfers money out of an account. We might describe the movement as entering a number, making a payment, returning a debt, or taking money without authorization. Those descriptions are not interchangeable for ethical assessment.

The example does not imply that an agent can make theft acceptable by selecting a flattering description. Some descriptions are false or omit morally relevant features. The task is to determine what the person is doing and why, rather than allowing vocabulary alone to settle the evaluation.

This is part of why conceptual psychology comes first in Anscombe's proposed inquiry. Questions about intention and motive affect the action being evaluated. They cannot safely be treated as decorative additions after a theory has already assigned its verdict.

Anscombe's discussion of Hume introduces an example involving a grocer, supplied potatoes, a bill, and money owed. She uses it to ask how one description is supported by a set of more basic facts. She calls these facts "brute" relative to that description.

The relation is not a division between entirely interpretation-free facts and everything social. Facts that are brute relative to one description may themselves rest on other descriptions. The fact that goods were supplied can support a statement about a debt; the supplying can in turn be described through events involving delivery.

Institutional context and exceptions matter. Ordering and receiving something may normally help justify the claim that payment is owed, while special circumstances change what follows. Anscombe explicitly resists treating a supporting set of facts as a complete analysis that automatically entails the higher description in every possible context.

A statement that someone gives a shilling also presupposes monetary institutions without itself being a description of the entire institution. This distinction lets us see how ordinary descriptions can depend on a wider practice. The dependence does not make every such statement a mere expression of feeling.

The grocer example challenges an oversimplified separation of descriptive language from terms such as "owes." It does not provide a general proof that any desired moral conclusion follows from whatever facts we choose. The particular relations between descriptions have to be explained.

Anscombe proposes using more specific concepts, such as injustice, instead of relying on a general verdict of moral wrongness. That directs attention to what a person does and the kind of defect involved. Calling something unjust says more about its character than merely adding emphatic disapproval.

However, the positive argument is not complete when the specific label has been applied. Explaining why injustice is bad involves understanding justice as a virtue. Anscombe says this requires an account of what a virtue is and how it relates to the actions in which it is exhibited.

She connects the further task with human flourishing. An adequate account would explain the kind of characteristic a virtue is and why a human being needs it. That is a demanding philosophical project, not simply a list of traits we happen to admire.

Consider an original example of a person who refuses to cheat a neighbor. We can ask what would make the cheating unjust, what the refusal expresses about the person's character, and how such character belongs to living well. The example identifies connected questions; it does not prove that every honest action benefits the agent immediately.

The unfinished character of this inquiry matters. Anscombe's appeal to flourishing should not be treated as an already demonstrated formula that makes every virtue profitable. The relation between acting justly and doing well as a human being is precisely something she says needs explanation.

The paper's discussion of Sidgwick concerns the relation between intention and responsibility. Anscombe rejects a treatment of intention that includes every foreseen consequence of voluntary action. She thinks that collapses a distinction relevant to ethical judgment.

Her example concerns someone responsible for supporting a child. Deliberately withdrawing support, whether as an aim or a means to another aim, differs from accepting imprisonment rather than doing something disgraceful when imprisonment foreseeably prevents support. The cases have a similar bad consequence but differ in what the agent intends.

The example is an argument about description and responsibility. It is not a complete decision about every possible obligation involving imprisonment or family support. Its role is to show why the similarity of an outcome does not by itself settle whether responsibility is identical.

Foreseeing a harm does not make the harm intended merely by definition. Equally, saying that harm was unintended does not automatically excuse the action. A person can be responsible for taking an unreasonable risk or ignoring alternatives. The distinction requires investigation rather than functioning as a verbal escape.

A hypothetical modern illustration can make the same point. Someone might knowingly cause inconvenience as a side effect of keeping an urgent commitment, or deliberately create the inconvenience to pressure another person. Calling both outcomes foreseeable leaves out the different purposes. It also leaves open whether either action was justified.

Anscombe uses the term consequentialism in the essay for the tendency she criticizes among the moral philosophers following Sidgwick. Her concern is with an approach that allows the balance of consequences to decide whether acts such as punishing the innocent may be justified.

She does not claim that consequences never matter. Her discussion distinguishes judging the circumstances of an act from allowing an anticipated outcome to erase every limit on what one may do. The problem concerns what role consequences have in justification.

Her account of casuistry helps clarify the contrast. A casuist considers whether a particular action in particular circumstances counts as murder, theft, or another prohibited kind. Borderline cases can require careful judgment. This does not mean that the central prohibition is suspended whenever a sufficiently attractive result is predicted.

There is a difficulty on the other side too: deciding what counts as the prohibited act. If an agent redescribes an action to avoid an inconvenient category, the analysis has failed. Anscombe's emphasis on action descriptions supplies a task for the prohibition-based view as well as a criticism of its rivals.

This is why presenting her argument as "character rather than rules" is misleading. The paper defends constraints on action while asking for an adequate account of virtue. She does not teach that a person with good intentions may bend any rule in pursuit of a preferred outcome.

One of the paper's sharpest commitments concerns judicially punishing someone for something clearly understood not to have been done by that person. Anscombe treats choosing that injustice as excluded, rather than an option to be weighed against a larger anticipated benefit.

The qualification about what is clearly known matters. Accidental conviction through mistaken evidence raises questions about error, responsibility, and the conduct of an institution. Deliberately arranging the punishment of a known innocent person identifies a different object of choice.

A hypothetical case can separate the issues. An official might knowingly fabricate evidence against an innocent person while predicting that the resulting conviction will calm a public disturbance. On Anscombe's view, the predicted benefit does not make that chosen injustice acceptable. The example is an application of her principle, not a case she reports.

A consequentialist can challenge the refusal to balance outcomes, especially when the predicted alternatives are severe. Anscombe does not resolve that disagreement by accepting the balancing procedure and changing a number. She disputes whether this kind of action belongs among the permissible options at all.

Understanding the disagreement requires keeping its structure visible. One side treats the kind of chosen act as imposing a limit; the other asks whether consequences can justify it. Rephrasing the dispute as a choice between caring and not caring about consequences obscures what is at stake.

The essay gives a reason to look carefully at familiar moral words before building a theory around them. Its strongest questions concern the relation between a vocabulary and the framework that sustains it, and the relation between an action's description and its evaluation.

A useful reading can follow one action through those questions. What is being done? Which descriptions are accurate? What is intended, and what is foreseen? Does calling the action unjust identify something that a general "morally wrong" verdict leaves unexplained?

Then ask what an account of virtue would need to establish. It must explain how a characteristic relates to action and how its exercise bears on human flourishing. Admiring a trait or giving it an ancient name is not sufficient.

Anscombe's redirection is therefore demanding even for a reader who rejects her genealogy of obligation. We still need an account of the acts being judged and the reasons offered for judging them. Her paper makes those explanatory tasks difficult to postpone.

• G.E.M. Anscombe, "Modern Moral Philosophy", Philosophy 33, no. 124 (January 1958), pp. 1–19. Read the opening three theses together with the later discussions of psychology, injustice, intention, and consequentialism.