>>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.
