Anscombe

I argue that Mackie's thesis about courage and self-interest is neither consistent with his 'error theory' of value nor convincing in itself.  The question of the objectivity of value needs to be distinguished from that of whether one value can objectively outweigh or outrank another.  This is so even when the only values under consideration are self-interested ones.

Although Anscombe’s moral philosophy is often described as an “absolutism”, commentators on Anscombe have confused what kind of absolutism she held. In this paper, I argue that to properly understand Anscombe’s position on ethical absolutism one must see it as essentially tied to her work on intention and not on external activities performed. When Anscombe’s view is understood in such a manner, it renders her moral philosophy more closely harmonious not only with her other philosophical works, but the Catholic intellectual tradition especially Thomism. And while one might extrapolate from this harmony Anscombe’s indebtedness to this tradition, one might just as easy see her philosophical work as itself being a clarifying force for contemporary accounts of ethics in the Catholic tradition. To be able to accomplish this, the paper first argues for a proper understanding of Anscombe’s ethical absolutism according to her contemporary commentators. One I have established this proper understanding, I indicate how, in the second part of the paper, ethicists working more directly in the Catholic intellectual tradition are closer to Anscombe’s authentic ethical account of absolutism than her own commentators. After exploring a place of seemingly inflexible disagreement for contemporary Catholic ethicists, I lay out how Anscombe’s account of intention can both illuminate the nature of her ethical absolutism and simultaneously contribute to that tradition from which she at least seems to have received.

This was originally a talk for an APA panel 'Anscombe's Intention, 50 years after' (in 2008 I think) ; it was reprinted in Ford, Hornsby, Stoutland, 'Essays on Anscombe's Intention', HUP 2014  The exhibition of Anscombe's independence from Wittgenstein is a crucial element in 'rescuing [her] from the enormous condescension of posterity', though it is pretty artlessly attempted in the first few pages here.

I argue that the idea of virtue has become central after the Fifties in both Anglo-Saxon and German moral philosophy  and that this revival has come together with recognition of the legitimacy of discussion of issues in normative ethics, something that philosophers both on the Continent and in the Anglo-Saxon world used to overlook in the first half of the twentieth-century. I point at examples such as Stuart Hampshire and Elizabeth Anscombe as proof of the centrality of virtue ethics in the first phase of the normative turn. I also argue that, far from being a radical alternative to ‘modern moral philosophy’ as its proponents believe, virtue ethics is precisely moral argument of the kind both Kantian ethics at its best and less dogmatic versions of utilitarianism have brought to the fore of philosophical discussion.

A sometime objection to certain forms of consequentialism is that these accounts resolve too easily, or resolve with the wrong verdict, certain kinds of tragic moral dilemmas. Elizabeth Anscombe is one author who has raised such an objection, and I will try to look closely at what this objection amounts to for Anscombe. I will first show why the situations Anscombe considers are a kind of dilemma that applies to direct consequentialism. I will suggest that Anscombe does not use the dilemma as a simple counterexample to direct consequentialism, but this being the case, Anscombe is in some danger of begging the question against direct consequentialism (as is anyone who uses dilemmas in this way). I will then argue that Anscombe does have a substantive account of just why these cases (apparently) show direct consequentialism to be untenable: essentially, that direct consequentialism does not recognize the moral difference between different possible descriptions of an action. From this, numerous pitfalls can follow in certain dilemmatic situations: direct consequentialism can certify as “right actions” actions that are not objects of moral evaluation at all; it can call “obligatory” actions that must not be done, and in general encourage people to do vicious things.
After problematizing direct consequentialism with Anscombe’s dilemmas, I will argue that Julia Driver’s account of global direct consequentialism does not suffer from these pitfalls, and thus survives Anscombe’s ‘tragic dilemma objection.’ My project is thus largely historical with a modest conceptual payoff at the end (with the application to Driver’s account).

In this paper I contend that Hegel has an "expressive" conception of action, that pretends to unite systematically both the psychological and the social or public aspects of it. On the one hand, Hegel seems to assume that we cannot identify an event as an action unless we are able to connect it with the "will and knowledge" of the agent that caused it. On the other, however, Hegel contends that the agent (1) knows what he intended to do first as he has already done it and (2) that the action must not be conceived as a causal consequence of certain mental states, but as an "expression" of who the agent is. Both intuitions could be brought together if we abandon mentalist and causalist conceptions of action and agency.
Keywords: action as "translation" from what is merely subjective in what is public; action as self-realization; action and intention

This is the general introduction to the book "Actions, reasons and agents. Essays on theory of action and moral and juridical imputation", edited by Juan Ormeño Karzulovic. It contains contributions of GEM Anscombe (the first spanish translation of the classical paper "Under a description", Ch. Korsgaard and original papers of the research group on philosophy of action of the Law Faculty of Universidad de Chile.
Keywords: agency and attribution of responsibility, philosophy of action in Aristotle, Kant, Hegel and contemporary philosophy of action.

[forthcoming September 2017; to appear in Routledge's "Philosophy and Method in the Social Sciences" series]


This study starts from a simple premise:  human practices are a fundamental constituent — arguably “the” fundamental constituent — of social reality.  It then poses the following question:  What would social scientists’ research look like if they took this insight quite seriously?

That, of course, would depend on what practices are in fact like:  what their generic features are, how they are constituted, how they might be identified and characterised and explained, how they function in concrete contexts, how they might change across time and space.  These are the kinds of questions that this book tries to tackle, insisting that their answers hold important implications for the effective practice of social science.

The book thus attempts to build a philosophical infrastructure for the empirical study of practices in the social sciences and humanities.  At the same time, it also tries to explore the implications of this ontology of human practices for issues in social theory and in the philosophy of the social sciences.  The book thus stands at the intersection of the philosophy of social science, social theory, and the social sciences.

To have a virtue is to possess a certain kind of trait of character that is appropriate in pursuing the moral good at which the virtue aims. Human beings are assumed to be capable of attaining those traits. Yet, a number of scholars are skeptical about the very existence of such character traits. They claim a sizable amount of empirical evidence in their support. This article is concerned with the existence and explanatory power of character as a way to assess the possibility of achieving moral virtue, with particular attention paid to business context. I aim to unsettle the so-called situationist challenge to virtue ethics. In the course of this article, I shall defend four claims, namely, that virtues are more than just behavioral dispositions, that at least some virtues may not be unitary traits, that psychologists cannot infer virtues from overt behavior, and that the situationist data do not account for the observational equivalence of traits. Since it rests on a misconception of what virtue is, the situationist objection remains unconvincing.

Consciousness and the Great Philosophers addresses the question of how the great philosophers of the past might have reacted to the contemporary problem of consciousness. Each of the thirty-two chapters within this edited collection focuses on a major philosophical figure from the history of philosophy, from Anscombe to Xuanzang, and imaginatively engages with the problem from their perspective.
    Written by leading experts in the field, this exciting and engaging book explores the relevance of the history of philosophy to contemporary debates and therefore is essential reading for students and scholars studying the history of philosophy, contemporary philosophy of mind and  consciousness, or both.