The problem with moral obligation › What remains to be done

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.