Elizabeth Anscombe on Living the Truth

I have the pleasure of introducing to you president of affray who tonight is going to speak to us about Elizabeth Anscombe on living the truth before I tell you more about our speaker thanks.thanks from the part of the Loom Christi Institute and I suppose thanks from you all go to the Nicholson Center for British studies and the philosophy department of the University of Chicago for co-sponsoring today's event prover Frey is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina Carolina since 2013 before that she taught at the University of Chicago in the position of collegiate division assistant professor of humanities and harbors MIT fellow and also she was an active member of the lumen christi institute further Frey has received various grants and rewards and other distinctions and in particular she received her PhD in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh I can testify that she received it deservedly I was I had the honor of being one of one of the people on the committee and one of her examiner's preser Frey works in the areas of action Theory ethics meta ethics history of ethics and various related areas she has written numerous articles and book reviews in these areas and is working on a number of books notably one of these books action virtue and human goodness she is also about to publish two collections one of these concerns the topic on which is going to speak to us tonight practical truth the other is called self transcendence and virtue effectives from philosophy psychology and theology she is editing this together with Professor Candice foie gras for the Fogler and professor frame were together principal investigators of an ambitious and imposing long-term project under the title virtual happiness and the meaning of life sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation her topic tonight is one on which she has been giving a lot of to which she has been giving a lot of thought over the last couple of years and she is I think uniquely qualified to talk about it you may think that professor phrase should have given her talk a bit earlier because truth is on the way out it's obsolete I I heard this on the news recently we have moved from the age of post modernity to the aid of post truth now perhaps the news was just fake news especially given the fact that we are living in age of passport never mind perhaps we'll be clear about this matter once we have heard professor frank give her talk [Applause] thank you and some I would like to thank Thomas lever good and the lumen christi institute for inviting me to speak tonight it's always a pleasure and an honor to speak here at the University of Chicago but it's a special treat for me to give a lecture for lumen christi it's an institution for which i have enormous respect and that occupies a special place in my heart so thanks to thomas this evening i'm gonna be speaking about Elizabeth Anscombe and practical truth my talk will be divided into three parts the first part of my talk will be devoted to saying some things about an scheme's person and her life although Anscombe is surely intriguing and her own right there are certainly many legendary stories that circulate about her my reasons for going into her personal biography are ultimately philosophical for we see in her life in an especially illuminating way the concept I wish to explore with you this evening the concept of a specifically practical form of truth a form of truth that is exemplified and a well lived human life an scam exemplified practical truth that is to say she lived the truth and the very sense I hope to make philosophically articulate so we shall begin by turning to her life for some pre theoretical material to draw up on the second part of my talk will be concerned with what Anscombe herself said about the concept of practical truth and its importance for both action theory and ethics the third and final part of the talk will try to begin to show how practical truth relates to practical wisdom and our understanding of the virtues and what it means to live well as a human being so part one the life and character of Elizabeth Anscombe Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Ann skom was born on March 18th 1919 in Limerick Ireland where her father then a British Army officer was stationed in 1937 she entered Oxford where she read mods and grades at st. Hugh's College in her first year at Oxford she formally converted to Roman Catholicism after having been raised and a religiously indifferent household this places her and the venerable tradition of those who studied their way into the Catholic faith and thus placed themselves under its demanding canonical norms out of a deep and abiding intellectual commitment Anscombe did this like many people despite the protestations of her family and other obvious negative social consequences in 1938 she met another philosopher Peter gage they married in 1941 after she graduated the following year she was awarded a research fellowship at Newnham College Cambridge where she stayed until 1945 it was during this time that she met Ludwig Wittgenstein and attended his lectures when this fellowship expired she was elected to a fellowship at Somerville College at the time that was the women's college at Oxford remaining there until 1970 and I think it bears mentioning that Oxford only admitted women beginning in 1920 and certainly when Anscombe was an undergraduate and her early career it was a place that was hostile to the presence of women despite being appointed at Oxford danske made weekly trips back to Cambridge to meet with Vick and Stein who became her close friend although Vick and Stein has been called a misogynist for his negative attitudes about women he was deeply impressed by admired and trusted Anscombe and he affectionately addressed her as old man he trusted her enough that he appointed her as one of his primary literary executor z' and trans leaders her translations of his works most famously her translation of his philosophical investigations have become modern classics in 1970 an scam was appointed to the chair Vic and Stein had occupied at Cambridge a position she held until her retirement from teaching in 1986 she had visiting appointments all over the world including here at the University of Chicago the Hanscom lounge is just down ha an scams philosophical accomplishments are too impressive to list in detail but suffice it to say that the following is undeniable she made considerable impact in all the major areas of philosophy ethics action theory philosophy of language and mind and even metaphysics her only monograph and tension as well as many of her papers are considered classics of 20th century analytic philosophy an scrims final lecture was titled doing the truth and her final publication practical truth there's something fitting about this as Anscombe was a philosopher who stood out and that she was not simply interested in knowing the truth but living it and she saw that there is a difference between these two ways of being related to reality and scums life was marked not only by a well-trained desire to know reality to grasp it as it is but the will to conform herself and her actions to it she put her formidable intellect and her considerable philosophical talents in the service of truth rather than in the service of other political ends and goals and I think she had little patience for those who didn't share the same seriousness about the truth that she did although Anscombe lived the intellectual life she was not withdrawn from practical affairs but her obedience to the truth is manifest on her practical life and very deep in obvious ways I will briefly mention just a few of them in 1939 at the age of 20 and skom published a pamphlet protesting British rhetoric and policy leading up to its involvement in World War two with the title the justice of the president war examined the pamphlet denounced both the government's aims and the means by which it was very likely to pursue them it predicted with stunning accuracy much of the immoral behavior that the British government would eventually in gave in during the war would Anscombe found most reprehensible was her government's popular rhetoric regarding the so called indivisibility of modern warfare such that the civilian population is considered combatants such that direct attacks upon their life are justified seven years later when she was a fellow at Somerville College Oxford and skom opposed Oxford's move to award president harry s truman an honorary degree an scan opposed this on the grounds that truman as the person who gave the order to drop atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was a mass murderer and scum called it murder because it was a calculated choice made by Truman to intentionally kill innocents indiscriminately for the sake of his further goals only three people at Oxford supported her vote and I think an skin' was deeply scandalized by this fact but her shock moved her to do the hard work of articulating and attacking the degenerations of thought that seemed to her to lurk behind her contemporaries approval of Truman's war crimes the arguments for Truman's decision fall under what an scam termed consequentialism the idea that if the consequences for one's actions bring about more good than evil the act is not only permissible but morally required ants come attacked this view and her influential essay modern moral philosophy published in 1958 she attacks it philosophically as resting on a problematic account of intention but she also notes that the view is radically out of joint with judeo-christian morality which has at its animating core a doctrine of absolute moral prohibitions including most obviously an absolute prohibition against murder she saw that consequentialism presents a direct attack upon the principle articulated by st. Paul in his letter to the Romans that we may never do evil that good may come an scums commitment to living the truth certainly put her on the outs with the Dons at Oxford and with the broader culture at large but it also made her the subject of vociferous and on charitable attacks so on your handout there's a lovely little reply to one such vociferous and uncharitable attack by Bernie Williams which i think is funny I'm not going to read it but it also put her at odds with some of her co-religionists in a famous debate with CS Lewis and skom destroyed one of his central arguments for theism while some were dismayed that she would so ardently opposed a well-known apologist arguing for the existence of God and scam simply saw herself as fulfilling a duty to expose what she took to be poor reasoning with her husband Peter gage Anscombe had seven children it strains credulity to think that she gave herself over to the creation and maintenance of a large family for personal gain or because she was simply smitten with domestic life the demands that motherhood placed on her at a time when few women worked outside the home let alone had the demanding career of an internationally acclaimed academic were obviously difficult and taxing but Anscombe clearly believed that the Christian ideal of chastity revealed a deep truth about the human person and she further believed that the practice of artificial methods of contraception were opposed to its cultivation and growth these beliefs were at the time and obviously still are deeply unpopular even among Roman Catholics both lay and clerical but again an scan followed the truth where she believed it took her an skin was willing to be arrested for her convictions and was not averse to public protest she was arrested twice at abortion clinics in her advanced age although her conservative fans tend to downplay her public opposition to world-war truhair world war ii harry truman the vietnam war and nuclear armament her progressive fans are equally embarrassed and pass over in silence her commitments to the inviolability and worth of each human person at every stage of human life and traditional ideas of chastity certainly it would be very difficult to characterize Anscombe in terms of our ready to hand political categories precisely because her thought and reasoning simply did not bend itself to conform to the goals of any political party or agenda finally although AM scam was a devout and committed Catholic many of her friends close collaborators and students were not in fact many were committed atheists who disagreed with her on matters of great consequence would allow Danskin to enter into these relationships in a deep way I suspect was her desire to understand a desire which led her into deep intellectual friendships with others who shared it and what her students and colleagues admired about her it seems was not simply her manifest brilliance although she was manifestly brilliant but her dogged pursuit of the truth and her willingness to pursue it as Vic and Stein had taught her the bloody hard way okay so that sounds good now practical truth so I planned that an screms life was marked by his desire not merely to know but to live the truth when we speak this way about truth we are registering a relation to it that takes on a characteristically practical mode it is this practical conception of truth that I now want to draw our attention to how do we situate thoughts about practical truth especially since it's not a concept that seems to have survived medieval philosophy and so it's foreign to much of contemporary thought it seems reasonable then to begin with Aristotle as the concept of practical truth comes from him an Anselm's own discussion of it is anchored in his but Aristotle doesn't give us much to go on Aristotle mentions practical truth exactly once it's on your handout it's from book six of the Nicomachean ethics it occurs in his discussion of the virtues that perfect our intellectual powers so our powers to know the attainment of truth he writes is the work of any intellectual capacity it provides a measure that success or its failure so a judgments true if it's good it's bad if it's false now Aristotle further marks a division between cognition and desire and on to that he graphs the separation between intellectual virtue so those are the virtues that perfect our powers for knowledge and moral virtue those that perfect our powers to desire what one perceives or judges is good now since knowledge and desire are the primary sources of action these powers must be habitually habituated properly in order for someone to act well wisdom allows us to judge and reason well about the most important things in life and is primarily about grasping and applying principles but moral virtue allows us to realize what is judged well in our actions and it is primarily about wanting things in accordance with reasons judgments to live well requires both well habituate well habituated intellect and appetites such that what one asserts as a matter of fact it is good to do and what one pursues in one's actions aligned if these conditions are in place Aristotle thinks that we can speak of quote practical thinking and of the attainment of a truth that is practical he calls it the truth corresponding to right desire okay so I'll limit myself to making just a few necessary points about this passage and so far as I think they will help us to understand and scrums analysis of it first it's worth mentioning that when Aristotle speaks of practical thought and reasoning he means thought and reasoning that is essentially aimed at acting so it's thought undergone from the first-person perspective with a view to acting rather than merely knowing Aristotle did not think that knowledge sufficed for action let alone act well so just to join up some evidence for this idea that knowledge is not sufficient for action we can think of the four types of agents that Aristotle outlines and the Nicomachean ethics that's the virtuous the vicious theocratic and the N Craddock so to illustrate the difference you can think of four different people at a party all being served drinks so the virtuous person drinks the appropriate amount enough to enjoy the pleasures of drinking but not too much not so much as to impair his reason or his health this person both knows and desires the right action and therefore makes a right decision and acts well with ease and pleasure the vicious person gets drunk not even realized that in so doing he is failing to act well so he thinks wrongly he's just living his best life and he's also for the moment at least really enjoying himself now the N Craddock or the merely self controlled person knows that he shouldn't have that third glass of his hosts rare bourbon but he really wants the third glass and though he refrains he leaves the party feeling the loss of the good he has denied himself so he's suffering a little bit so he chooses the right action but he doesn't do so wholeheartedly he does it in a divided way and with difficulty now this guy is clearly better than the drunk and his action deserves praise but his action also still falls short of the kind of human excellence that virtue exemplifies okay and lastly we have the aquatic person at the party he also knows he shouldn't have that third glass of bourbon like the in credit he still really wants it unlike the in credit he lacks all self-control and does what he knows he ought not to do any later regrets his choice right so he knows he shouldn't have the drink and he drinks it anyway that's a thing that humans do strange and mysterious okay so the fourfold division just shows that knowing does not suffice to explain a good choice and certainly does not give us a full measure of acting well acting well as Aristotle insists requires a logos that is an agreement with right desire and so practical thought is excellent only insofar as it agrees with right desire which makes executing lunch ones choices easy and enjoyable the second thing to say is that practical thought begins with something wanted so some human good that's at a distance and makes its way down to an action that could realize that good here and now so it moves from the general and the abstract to the particular and the concrete thought is not practical because it's thought about the good or the human good or even my own good it's practical because of its starting points and it's gold now if practical thought essentially aims at acting such that the proper conclusion of practical deliberation is an action then practical judgment is of the kind that terminates an action this is at least how an scam reads Aristotle you can see on the quotes in the handout she argues for this in the first essay she wrote on practical truth in 1965 she writes that we can speak of practical truth when and this is a quote the judgment involved in the formation of the choice leading to the action are all true but the practical truth is not the truth of those judgments it is truth and agreement with right desire okay now while I agree with the spirit of what Anscombe says here I would ever so slightly restate her claim by saying practical truth is not the dru truth of those judgments simpliciter for if truth is the proper work at the intellect then it must be the judgment that is true that is the judgment must be the bearer of truth but what makes the truth practical is that it is in agreement with right desire and this agreement is part of our evaluation of the judgment itself because of the kind of truth that pertains to it as a practical judgment so it's not regular old truth plus something right desire precisely because it's not regular old judgment plus some other condition to say that I think misunderstands the nature of practical thought reasoning and judgment whose characteristic activity is to attain the kind of truth that agrees with right desire and leads to the execution of a good choice in action okay so I think it might help to explain this difference if we look to the differences between theoretical and practical judgment so to bring out these differences I'll just consider two different judgments judgment one tomislav are good is sitting in the third row let's assume as the evidence suggests that this is true so long as I have grasped things aright the judgments it's true it's just true as a judgment it's good nothing more needs to be done now consider a second kind of judgment I should brush my teeth before my talk this seems like a good thing to do so let's just assume that that judgment is also true now in order for that judgment to be practical rather than a theoretical judgment about a practical matter I have to have made it within a deliberative context that is to say with a view to bringing it about that I will brush my teeth before my talk so it must arise because of something I want to have pleasant interactions with my colleagues to keep up appearances and thereby become the grounds of a choice that I realize in action but if I never brush my teeth let's say because I forget because I plan my time unwisely then the judgment fails to be fully what it ought to be as a judgment ie practically true for the a judgment to attain practical truth I have to brush my teeth at the appointed hour and that takes agreement with right desire so because practical judgment comes from and is ordained to deliberative desire or choice its well-functioning is exemplified and acting well of this sort of truth and scam rights and this is a quote from your handout that it the truth is brought about made true by action since the description of what one does is made true by his doing it provided that a man forms and executes a good choice now ants come obviously does not mean that the act of brushing my teeth is what makes it true that I ought to brush my teeth rather she thinks that the practicality of the truth lies in the fact that I bring about an event that is true under intentional descriptions that come from the practical judgment that I've made that I ought to brush my teeth of course not every action will produce practical truth in this sense the actions of the wicked man or the weak willed or the just plain ignorant will produce practical falsehood so ants can brace the man who forms and execute an evil choice will also make true some description of what he does he then will have produced practical falsehood okay so briefly here's how I interpret an screms remarks on practical truth practical truth is fully secured by actions that can be truthfully described at the most general level of intentional description as living well although the bearer of practical truth is a judgment because practical judgments are the formal causes of both choice and action there is a sense in which practical truth can be applied directly to actions as Anscombe insists and so far as enacting an agent makes true the descriptions under which she acts as indicative of her practical and judgment of a practical judgment and choice all the way up to the most general fallen Terry action description of living well judgment alone doesn't secure practical truth because the judgment is only fully practical when what is judged true is made to inaction which it does by being an agreement with right desire to make sense of practical truth in this sense I think we need to defend six theses one that we act under intentional descriptions that are objects of practical knowledge and in so doing make those descriptions true of our bodily movements these descriptions to these descriptions can always be subsumed under more general human action descriptions three every human action is a moral action so it's the kind of thing that can and ought to be characterized truly as living well for we can make lower level particular descriptions of action true while at the very same time be making higher level more general action descriptions false five and so far as enacting we make the description living well false by what we do we're creating a practical falsehood and our action and our practical reasoning can be criticized six truth comes in degrees only the fro nemo's or the practically wise possess the fullness of practical truth and it is exemplified in their lives okay so I'm going to dispense with these claims now I'm just going to say how an scam gets to them or how I think she gets to them but I'm not gonna argue for them although I'm happy to argue for them with you in the Q&A so the first claim that we act under intentional descriptions that are objects of practical knowledge that's the stuff of intention a monograph that an scan published in 1958 in order to motivate the importance of intentional descriptions of actions we can notice that anytime we act we cause many things to happen so to borrow a famous example from Donald Davidson Jones walks into a room and flips a light switch in so doing Jones moves a bunch of particles about he tenses and flexes such-and-such muscles he raises his arm he illuminates the room he casts a shadow on the wall he produces a clicking noise he wakes up the unsuspecting dog he alerts a prowler to the presence of the owner of the house and so on all of these descriptions of what Jones does are in a familiar sense perfectly true but not all of these descriptions pick out what Jones causes to happen as a matter of his will and practical reasoning those are the intentional or voluntary descriptions a theory of action and scheme things must give some way to sort out intentional from non intentional descriptions of what a person does now one thing that Anscombe makes clear is that an intentional description is the one the agent applies to her own actions through a certain kind of knowledge of them so Jones can't be intentionally alerting the Prowler if he has no idea that a prowler is there Anscombe calls the knowledge that a person has of what he does under intentional descriptions practical knowledge one displays this kind of knowledge when one is able to give sincerely true answers to a special sense of the question why true answers are supposed to reveal the agents reasons for acting now we might notice in general that when we ask someone why they're doing whatever we can see that they're up to their answers typically relate the present action to something else that they're also doing for example I am standing at a podium reading this sentence because I'm giving a talk I'm giving a talk because I'm an assistant professor building my CV I'm building my CV in order to get tenure I'm seeking tenure because I'm an academic and so on but ultimately you could ask me why I'm an academic here the answer is going to be but I love the intellectual life reading writing and thinking our activities I find rewarding despite how much they challenge me now what my answers to the why question bring out are my reasons and my reasons are ultimately cashed out in terms that the ends are goods that my actions are ordered to realize since the will is the capacity to make things happen in accordance with our practical thought about what ought to happen what is an object of will must be known under descriptions that connect the action descript two ones further ends or goals and ultimately to one's vision of how to live without such a vision of what is good or bad and human life quite generally what is worth pursuing and what worth avoiding we would not have reasons for acting at all and we would not be able to answer the why question so human actions are rationally ordered but the order we find inscribed in them comes from practical reason and will we discover this order through reason and impose it on the world through our action so the unity of my action and the unity of my life comes from the joint work of practical reasoned judgment and will so at present you could say I'm realizing my practical thought and decision in my bodily movements my judgment that I ought to give a talk in light of my desire to build my CV so I can continue the great privilege of living the intellectual life explains my choice to give the talk and to do what was necessary to make it true that I am presently giving it what explains the fact that I know what I'm doing right now in a non observational and immediate way is my first personal knowledge of the order of reasons and desire that makes these particular bodily movements and sounds into a unified action that can truthfully be called giving the talk in doing what I presently do I am making that order of description of events practically true in an skom sense now if the unity of an action just is the unity of an agent's practical reasoning as Anscombe argues that it is then we would expect to see this unity displayed in an account of the practical syllogism which makes articulate the structure of rational deliberation the practical syllogism is a formal representation of a practical argument that displays how the performance of the human action which is the conclusion of the syllogism preserves the good articulated by its major premise through means stipulated in the minor premise now the starting points of practical reason in the case of the practical syllogisms is not a representation of the content of some possible belief or judgment as is the case and a theoretical syllogism it's a representation of a possible object of will or an intention this in conjunction with premises stipulating the suitable means to realizing it yields an action that preserves the good stated in the first premise the action is made practically intelligible in light of the premises which Anscombe argues shows what good or what use the action is so intentional descriptions of actions are the ones that configure in such a syllogism should one bother to make one these are the descriptions that pick out among the many things that an agent is causing to happen the one that she causes to happen in accordance with her practical reason and will so if we can speak of a practical form of reasoning and knowledge we might also speak of a practical form of inference in a paper or practical inference and some notes that inference is related to the concept of validity and moreover that the validity of an inference is supposed to be of a certain formal character the appreciation of which is connected with the evaluation of grounds quai grounds she argues that if there is a unique form of practical inference its validity will have a different kind of ground from the validity of theoretical inference she writes in the sphere of practical reasoning goodness of the end has the same role as truth of the premises has in theoretical reasoning now Anscombe seems to think that practical inference is unique because the starting points of practical reasoning are objects of desire rather than belief it's because the starting points of practical reasoning is an intention for an end practical inference from this general intention to some specific concrete action that will realize it is goodness preserving in her sense by contrast since the starting point of theoretical reasoning is some belief that is taken to be true the inference from this belief to some for their conclusion is truth preserving so just to put this slightly more formally maybe for the philosophers in the room we can say that the rules of valid argument in the theoretical mode are designed to ensure that in reasoning one will never pass from something that is true to something that is not true if there are rules for practical inference they must ensure that the inference conforms to a pattern that will never lead from an end that is good to the pursuit of an action ordered to an end that is bad just as the truth of the premises is communicated to the truth of the conclusion and a valid theoretical argument so the goodness of the initial practical premise the desire for a good human life or doing well is communicated to the conclusion which is which is acting in a way to realize it concretely through your action so then the syllogism will be practically valid if its conclusion is the execution or realization of the order outlined in the premises and if what is so specified meets some determinate measure of correct calculation ie if what is chosen is legitimate means to an end an action that manages to meet this criteria will be practically true in an skom sense drawing the conclusion or acting is a kind of making true of the intentional order a making true that preserves the goodness of the end intended in the first premise and preserve through the second premise specifying the means in the case of a valid practical syllogism what is made true is that what happens comes under the intentional descriptions specified in the premises this is the truth one produces an acting or truth and agreement with desire we might say then that practical truth preserves the good from thought to action but just as validity is not the final analysis of an argument a good argument must also be sound so truth an agreement with desire is not sufficient for practical truth in the fullest degree this would be truth in agreement with right desire or the realization of intentional descriptions that are not merely a correct means to one's end but moreover are really instances of living well so correct means to an end that is really good the truth about what ends living well consists in will be grounded in the reality of the human person and its surrounding world when the logos is true practical principles have been correctly grasped and applied to the circumstances and a sound practical judgment about what to do is made okay so finally I should say that I think practical truth is predicated not only relative to the content of descriptions and their form but also the level of generality of description itself to see this I will just borrow a famous example from intention of a man pumping poisoned water into a cistern in order to replenish the house water supply as Anselm's describes this person he's performing those actions for the sake of poisoning the Nazis that occupy the house anthem tells us that the man who contaminated the source has calculated that if these people are destroyed some good men will get into power who will govern well we're even Institute the kingdom of heaven on earth and secure a good life for all people now while the man makes the intentional description pumping poisoned water into the cistern and poisoning the Nazi is true by his action he's also making the more general Act description of murder or acting unjustly practically true but he is not making it practically true that he is bringing about the kingdom of heaven on earth and certainly not that he's living well he is not realizing an event that is true under those more general descriptions because his calculation is an error so I guess the thing that I want to note about this is that an scam is placing so I think anyway in the aristotelian Thomas tradition by thinking that human action is moral action which is just to say that every human action is capable of being truly or falsely described as living well that would be like the highest level of intentional action description so the highest level description will be that of living well or living a good human life on this account practical truth comes in degrees and it's relative to intentional context the fullness of practical truth is something though only the practically wise possess but insofar as one acts intentionally at all and has some practical knowledge likewise it seems to me and to an skom that one has some possession of practical truth okay so my last section is practical truth and virtue in closing I want to say a few things about how I understand the concept of practical truth figuring in our account of virtue and the excellent or happy human life since time is short I'll be very brief let us assume with Aristotle and Aquinas that virtue is necessary but not sufficient for living well virtue perfects our human capacities such that we were able to direct them towards the creation and maintenance of a good human life the virtuous person is the one who possesses practical truth and lives well it is because he attains this truth that we rightly say he is the rule and measure of good or bad human action such persons are exemplars for those of us who are trying to grow in virtue those who possess some practical truth but not the fullness of it the fullness of practical truth requires both practical wisdom and moral virtue these are the conditions of choosing actions that are practically true with ease and pleasure we can see this more clearly by drawing on Aquinas on the cardinal virtues the cardinal virtues for Aquinas being prudence justice temperance and fortitude Aquinas teaches that prudence secures the good of practical reason through right practical judgment justice execute or realizes this good and external actions fortitude protects the good of reason by training our fears so that we can hold fast to the truth in the face of difficult circumstances and temperance safeguards the good of reason against sensual desires that draw us away from it now while prudence disposes a person to make good practical judgments this condition depends on the person having rectitude of will which further depends on having rectitude of passion and sensual desire for fears and bodily pleasures distract the mind and cloud our judgments which can lead us to perform actions that are unjust Saphira can drive us to abandon our friends we might think of Peter denying Christ lust can lead us to commit adultery and so on Aquinas is definition of moral virtue is that it preserves reason he is clear that in order to attain practical truth or exercise practical wisdom one needs the moral virtues a well-ordered soul now this leads me to my final point one cannot see things rightly without wanting and feeling rightly disordered desire distorts our perception of reality in systematic ways it leads us to direct our attention to features of the world that conform to our desires and ignore those that don't self-deception as a result of this narrowed vision of reality a vision whose roots lie and a disordered self-love in order to become virtuous we need to be exposed to those who possess practical truth those who live the truth and thereby make real human excellence alive for others we need to see write practical reasoning on display and virtuous lives so that we can progress and virtue by imitation now all this raises the question of how practical truth relates to truth simpliciter on this question which is of enormous importance I can only gesture somewhat inadequately towards the shape of what I take to be a promising line of response someone who lives well possesses the truth in a specifically practical sense but practical truth is derivative of truth simpliciter that is practical truth depends on having a correct grasp of reality a good human life is one that is in tune with reality most importantly the reality of the human person and its characteristic activities and goods to realize the good and thus make qu the description living well of one's actions in the world depends on possessing the truth about what sort of life is genuinely worth living how we come to possess that truth is not something I'm in a position at present to explain but I will say that what makes a vision of life true will be realities of the human person and we must know those realities in order to possess truth in the practical sense ok so I want to close now with some final thoughts about living the truth as we can understand this through the extraordinary life of Elizabeth Anscombe as comes life demonstrates one final point which is that fidelity to the truth does not make for a happy life in the sense of an easygoing life devoid of suffering personal struggle or pain to love and to be obedient to the truth take sacrifice and is often enough an occasion of real human suffering reality is often unpleasant living the truth can make you the subject of attack arrests and condemnation it might destabilize family ties sometimes it can cost you your life I think an scam understood this in a personal way and though she did things especially philosophy the bloody hard way I think most of us will look on her life with admiration and rightly judge that it was well lived despite its obvious difficulties thank you for your attention [Applause] okay yes I said that disordered desire distorts our perception of reality because it makes us pay attention to things that accord with what we want and to ignore things that don't so I think this is a very common and abiding feature of human life there's a lot of empirical social science that points out all the ways in which we do this but we kind of ignore what's right in front of our nose because what's right in front of our nose is unpleasant or it doesn't fit with our ends or goals and so it explains the things we investigate versus the things we don't investigate desire tends to guide where we direct our attention and so it's interesting when a - discusses the virtue of studio citas versus curiosity us so Studio C toss is a well-ordered appetite to understand reality now why is that a well-ordered appetite right is the interesting question and I think what aquinas is recognizing is that even the desire to know has to be well trained right in order for someone to live the intellectual life in a flourishing way because a lot of things that you might know are trivial or unimportant some things even you shouldn't investigate so yeah I think that desire directs our attention and when desire is disordered it leads to a distorted perception of reality the thing that you don't want to know is painful right so suppose that you're the CEO of a company that depends on exploiting fossil fuels like you might not want to know so much about climate change science because that's that comes into conflict with the way you're making your money right and so you know you might not look into that but why aren't you looking into that right and and it's not that you want to understand things you want to know like you're so you're not guided by this desire to understand the world sort of what's guiding you is making money right well it can be disordered yes definitely a desire for a desire for money can be fine but it can also be disordered you know she didn't write does she write about graves Kenna's she writes about sin I can't think of any a discussion yeah so she doesn't I mean it's interesting why she you know I'm sure there's an important story there but she doesn't write a lot about what we might now call philosophy of religion or even theology and and I don't know why but I don't know what her thoughts about grace are I mean I could guess but it would it would be a speculation you so I think that it's not intended in the sense that most contemporary philosophers would understand that so it's not the object of a propositional attitude intended so it's not like I'm thinking in a conscious way oh this is acting well because that would be a stupid like one thing we must not do with ants cam is a tribute a stupid view to her because she was not stupid so that can clearly not be her view but I think it's intended in a broader sense that the Scholastic's think of intention right so if you think about the practical syllogism and you think about the first the first premise of a practical syllogism its intelligibility with lies on some vision of how to live and so I think that you can tell a story about how the intelligibility of the first premise depends on this for this wider context right of that for the sake of which and then I think ultimately we blow that up to living well now you have to do some work to flesh that out non cycle psychologists eclis so it's not it's really a point about the structure of practical reason itself and it's starting points now Anscombe herself is not totally clear on this so when she talks about whether or not there's a final end she tends to say things like well if there were a final end and certainly we would have a measure it you know but she never really comes out and and says oh yes there's there's definitely one that is is the source and summit of all of this she comes um her later writings so she has a paper good and bad human and which she sounds sort of more tomecek about these things I'm my reading of intention the account that she gives of intentional descriptions and their intelligibility is ultimately gonna have to have that kind of an account but I don't think she herself commits herself to it and I think there might be a lot of reasons why she wouldn't do that and not all of them are that she didn't herself believe it but you know why should we think that that's true well that's a long and complicated story but I think ultimately it bottoms out in an understanding of the structure of practical reasoning and the nature of practical intelligibility and so for every for every end that you have its intelligibility comes from an end or the end itself is one of the basic and telogen goods and I don't know I feel like now I feel like I have to explain what I don't mean about basic intelligible goods but you know you can be charitable you know enough about me to figure out what I do and don't mean by saying that yeah it's it's a it's a it's a story about practical reasoning in the end so that yes so that's a time so in an earlier version of this handout which had the problematic feature of being over one page I had a quote from Aristotle's metaphysics talking about how truth comes in degrees I exercised that quote because I just wanted one beautiful page but yeah Aristotle thinks that truth comes in degrees I don't I am in favor of that view I haven't argued for that view I think I think that view is defensible I guess that's really and and I'm not sure that that's so opposed to contemporary work I mean certainly formal epistemology thinks that their degrees of belief and it's all subjective probabilities and then they have a bunch of math so I don't I don't think it's hopeless but I'm like I'm not gonna defend that right now cuz that would take yeah oh yeah so who think of being Craddock right I mean he's not there's a sense in which like he's doing the right thing you know like he's he's almost there but but there's the DS also falling short of human excellence right but I actually think a lot of human action in various ways if you think about there's so many ways the human action can go wrong it's kind of depressing but you know the extent to which it goes wrong it's maybe it's maybe it's a problem in your thought maybe it's a problem in your desire maybe it's kind of both then we can talk about you know degrees of truth I think where we don't talk about that is win so there's a kind of error that I haven't discussed at all and that's just when like the world doesn't do you a favor so it's like you're like you're fine but then the world's messed up or whatever so like I was all ready to give my talk and then somebody blew up the building well you know that's not talks not gonna happen it's really not my fault but now that's a we just run our standard line on interference right the world has to do you a favor yeah but that wouldn't but that doesn't like impugn your capacity to get on to the truth it's just that your capacity was externally interfered with yeah well you know I don't think it's that hard to see when a human life has kind of gone off the rails but um but I think ultimately while you're touching on is the relation of practical truths just truth call it theoretical truth or whatever just truth in the good old fashioned sense and yeah so I think that in order for me to judge somebody's action as good or bad you know I I have to understand the measure of them right so I have to know what it is to live well as a human being how we come to that okay that's a hard question but just suppose there's some story about that that we can all believe then that's the kind of knowledge that I possess now I can possess that nuts so this is what so this is a this is a feature that's interesting to me I can be a total jerk and know the difference between right and wrong um and I myself can be like basically a mess know that I'm a mess and so also be able to look at someone else who's a mess and be like yeah that's a that's not going well so I myself don't have to be the beautiful virtuous person to see error and and that that itself shows that there are two different kinds of knowledge of human good right you can know so like I think it's possible actually for someone to be like a really good moral theorist so like they they've like got this beautiful theory of human good but they themselves are basically a mess just a total mess and it's very interesting that this is possible I know people that will not name names but it's totally possible and I mean this was really striking to me at an early age in this thinking yeah there really is something different about a practical with a practical kind of knowledge it operates in a different way and it's not just about content because you know the guy with the beautiful more of theory like he's got the right content he gets it you know it's got these true propositions but they're not like they don't translate into a well lived life now how how can that be actually is a very perplexing thing but so part of I think the onus of developing an account of practical reasoning is its explaining that cuz that's just like data that's facts right like you know philosophy should just make sense of that somehow yeah so a lot of yeah I mean so picking out the sphere of the voluntary which would be the sphere of personal responsibility is really hard I do think that that is part of the goal that ants come is is attempting an intention I don't think that she thought she was giving a full account but I think you're touching on a really difficult and important question I mean even if like even if we just abstracted from that kind of like really big picture hurts up if you just think about tort law which I actually think a lot about it really fascinating even that gets really confusing because tort law is all about kind of like liability and damages and like what actually is the sphere of my personal responsibility and what's just like things that happen cuz I did something and that weren't really I think that's all enormous ly difficult so might so I've written about this and my I won't bore you it with my own view but I I do think that a theory of practical knowledge is gonna have to sort that out such that whatever can be said to be an object of your practical knowledge is going to constitute the outer limits of but what gets tricky is negligence which is actually what I'm writing about right now some negligence is a is really tricky so that's like what you don't do but you're responsible for we could haven't should have done but yeah I mean you're asking about oh well you know there's capitalism and and so like we're constrained in all of these ways and that's true but even if I don't know even if we didn't live under buuut of capitalism like we'd still be constrained in all of these all of these like really obvious ways I mean just the universe constrains us in various interesting ways and so I think it's just part of human life that there's gonna be some kind of economic order of things that's going to narrow down our options but I certainly don't think it's the case and I certainly don't think that Anscombe thinks it's the case that well capitalism so I'm not responsible for like you know these unjust things that I'm doing I don't think she's gonna buy that at all I mean I think she is gonna think that there is still such a thing as wronging someone within a system of laws and and you know you have to be held accountable for that and I think she can do that and acknowledge that you know maybe the system of laws itself or a little bit I mean I actually don't know what and some things about about capitalism but whatever socio-economic political order there is there's still gonna be personal responsibility in a in a sphere of personal freedom and and that's gonna get cashed out in terms of what comes under the domain of my voluntary control and what comes under that is I think going to be an object of practical knowledge you yeah so one thing that so she doesn't write a lot about that but one thing that she does seem to agree with Aquinas about and this is a disagreement with Aristotle it seems to me is that people are perfectly capable of just doing what they know is completely wrong so like they don't have to be ignorant of the good just so they can knowingly choose bad things Quine is calls that malice that's really bad like I think if you're doing like that's the worst way to be because you really don't have an excuse so like there might be three sources of wrongdoing you just don't know and then there's question of is your ignorance culpable there's all right well you've got disordered passions okay well you know we can talk about that and whether whether and to what extent you're responsible for that but then there's just doing what you know is wrong and she seems to agree that that's a real human phenomenon that deserves explanation but like Aquinas so Aquinas has a theory of malice which I wouldn't have time to get into but his theory of malice takes the guise of the good into account so he thinks I mean he's like a complicated story about how you knowingly choose the lesser good and how that's possible and compatible with a very strong version of the guise of the good but he also has a theory advice according to which the vicious person is after some real intelligible human good but just in a disordered way yeah so she herself doesn't say much about those things but when she does say them she kind of does the head nod to Aquinas so I just assuming that she's sympathetic to that but I am NOT certain

Channel: Lumen Christi Institute

Views: 8,637

Rating: 4.9304347 out of 5

Keywords: Lumen Christi Institute, Lumen Christi, Elizabeth Anscombe, Anscombe, Jennifer Frey, Jen Frey, University of Chicago, Action Theory, Ethics, Morality, Catholic Church, Catholicism, University of South Carolina

Id: a3HbMAgcOvY

Length: 65min 50sec (3950 seconds)

Published: Mon May 21 2018