Analytic & pragmatist · 1919–2001
G. E. M. Anscombe
Wittgenstein’s student and translator who relaunched virtue ethics
Modern moral philosophy uses a “moral ought” cut off from the divine-law framework that once gave it sense; we should first develop a philosophy of psychology, of action, intention and virtue.
Life and thought
Elizabeth Anscombe (1919–2001) became a Catholic as a teenager, studied at Oxford and then at Cambridge, where she was one of Wittgenstein’s closest students. She translated his Philosophical Investigations and was one of his three literary executors. In 1956 she publicly opposed Oxford’s honorary degree for President Truman, calling the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki murder. Married to the philosopher Peter Geach, she held Wittgenstein’s old chair at Cambridge from 1970 to 1986.
Her book Intention (1957) asked what makes an action intentional, and answered that it is one to which a certain sense of the question “Why?” applies, answered by giving reasons; it founded the modern philosophy of action. Her essay “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958) argued that the idea of a special moral “ought” makes sense only within a framework of divine law that modern moral philosophers had abandoned. Until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, she urged, we should set it aside and return to Aristotle’s ideas of virtue and flourishing. The essay launched the revival of virtue ethics and coined the word “consequentialism”.