>>Dr. Linda Zagzebski:In 1958 Oxford philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe published a revolutionary
and highly adversarial paper called “Modern Moral Philosophy”. In this paper she argued
that English moral philosophers did not differ from each other in any important sense. They
all had given up the idea of a virtue as well as the idea of happiness in the sense of fulfillment
rather than pleasure. Obligation had become the central concept in ethics. But they had
had also detached ethics from a religious foundation. In fact, most of them were atheists.
For the followers of Kant, moral obligation meant that each rational being legislates
morality for herself. But Anscombe argued that the idea each of us as a self-legislator is incoherent.
Our own will is not capable of supporting the weight of moral obligation. Only a divine
law giver is capable of being the foundation of obligation and the strong sense desired
by these philosophers. At that time Utilitarianism dominated English ethics. And according to
Utilitarians, obligation is a matter of maximizing pleasure for as many people as possibl. But,
Anscombe argued, this approach leads to calling many wicked acts obligations, like the judicial
punishment of the innocent. Acting on our obligations cannot simply be a matter of producing
good consequences. We can produce good consequences by lying, cheating, stealing, breaking promises,
and committing murder. Anscombe’s point was that the vast majority of English moral philosophers
faced a dilemma. Either return to the idea that there is a God who legislates morality
and is the source of our moral obligations, or else give up obligation as the central
moral concept and go back to a virtue theory. But to do that, she argued, there is much
work to do because we cannot do virtue ethics without first doing a careful philosophical
investigation of central ideas that moral philosophy needs. Like the idea of an action,
an intention, desire, pleasure, motive, emotion. All of these ideas were largely ignored in
the moral philosophy of the time. Her attack on contemporary ethics then amounted to an
attack on the weakness of its foundation and the neglect of the concepts that would be
needed to do it correctly. Anscombe herself was both a religious believer and a virtue
ethicist so her argument could be interpreted as either a plea to return to a religious
foundation for an ethical system that is centered on obligation, or a return to virtue ethics.
As far as I know, nobody she addressed took the first option, but her paper eventually
brought new life into virtue ethics. Although it took decades for the paper to become widely
quoted, and it became more famous as time went on. Twenty years later another Oxford
philosopher, Philippa Foot, wrote two very influential papers in which she argued that
we cannot abandon the idea of human well-being and pretend that our moral discourse makes
sense. Anyone who uses moral terms must abide by the rules for their use. Including rules
for what counts as evidence for or against any assertion one makes using a moral term.
So suppose we want to say that it is a duty to do something. When we do that we commit
ourselves to referring to why it matters if we don’t do it. We need to refer to harms
and benefits and the fact that one thing is more important than another. But to do that
we need to follow the rules about what counts as a harm and what counts as a benefit and
what makes something important. We cannot just decide that something is a harm or is
not a harm, that something is a benefit or not a benefit. Once we do that we see that
we are answerable to certain facts about human beings, facts that we did not make up ourselves.
The same point applies to many non moral terms like the word rude. Foot says suppose somebody
looks at a man walking slowly up to the front door and says “That is rude.” You will
be puzzled. You will think that maybe the speaker is from a different culture with different
rules of etiquette or maybe there are rules in your own culture you’re not aware of.
But if that’s not the situation the speaker has violated the rules for the use of the word rude.
We don’t get to say that just any behavior is rude. We must refer to something about
giving offense or intending to give offense or violating rules that are constructed to
prevent offense or something like that. Without those rules the word rude has no meaning.
The moral I take from Foot is that what is rude or a duty or harmful or dangerous or
beneficial is not arbitrary. Nor is it a matter of personal decision or democratic vote. The
way the world is fixes, or at least constrains, what we can say when we use moral terms as
well as a lot of non moral terms that are connected with them. We cannot pretend to know what
morality is about without carefully attending to an investigation of human beings. Our physical
nature, our psychological nature, and our social nature. Reference to these aspects
of nature are embedded in the way we speak about morality. Philippa Foot came to UCLA
in the 1970s when I was a graduate student there and she was very influential on the
development of American virtue ethics in the last decades of the twentieth century. Another
British immigrant to the US was Alasdair MacIntyre a Scottish philosopher whose 1981 book “After
Virtue” was a turning point in the rebirth of virtue ethics and American moral philosophy.
We will study MacIntyre’s work next.