Transcript for:
Elizabeth Anscombe's Moral Philosophy

so today we're going to be looking at elizabeth anscombe and her writing modern moral philosophy so i want to begin by uh just kind of reading the first part of it she says i'll begin by stating three theses which i present in this paper the first that it's not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology in which we are conspicuously lacking the second is that the conceptions of obligation and duty moral obligation and moral duty that is to say and of what is morally right and wrong and of the moral sense of odd ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible because there are survivals or derivatives from survivals from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives and are only harmful without it my third thesis is what the difference between the well is that the difference between the well-known english writers and moral philosophy from cedric to present day are of little importance so three pretty bold theses that she's going to begin here by saying so the first one is that uh we aren't going to be able to do anything with moral philosophy until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology and so we're conspicuously lacking that so instead of focusing on moral philosophy we should be focusing on philosophy of psychology and building that up the second is this idea of obligation and duty or at least when we're talking about moral obligation and duty and moral right and wrong um these are you know just kind of remnants of what she's going to talk about with like divine law theory and if we're going to give up divine law theory then we should give up talk about obligation and duty because it just doesn't fit with anything else or at least any other type of ethic and then lastly she has this bold claim that uh basically all english moral philosophers from syndra siddwick onward are of little to no importance then she talks about anyone who has read aristotle's ethics and has also read modern moral philosophy must have been struck by the great contrast between them so then what she's going to be doing is she kind of gives an account here of the difference between um you know looking at where ethics kind of began with socrates plato and aristotle and like where it is today and like how great of a contrast there is uh and then talks about how like for aristotle um there's not really this notion of blame instead it says that there are some mistakes he says which are causes not of involuntariness and actions but of scoundrelism and for which man a man is blamed so really what he talks about when he's talking about blame here is uh more this notion that like it's coming from this core of a person's character uh at the very beginning of the second page he says that someone professes to be expounding aristotle and talks in a modern fashion about mortals such and such he must be very imperceptive so again what you'll also notice here is uh i mean we already kind of thought when she said you know cedric onward these people have little importance um but she is quite blunt in her um perception of people to put that in a light way uh so basically saying anyone who's expounding aristotle but talks with moral obligation or moral duty or rightness or wrongness as you're saying they're rather dull uh next paragraph here we cannot then look to aristotle for any elucidation of the modern way of talking about moral goodness obligation etc and all the best known riders on ethics in modern times from butler to mill appear to me to have faults as thinkers on the subjects uh on the subject which makes it impossible to hope for any direct light on it from them i will slate these objections with the brevity with her with which their character makes possible so then she kind of for the next like couple pages tears into basically everyone from butler to mill to hume to kant um and talks about like what she does not like with any of them um and why they're just in fact wrong in her opinion so again she's really not holding any punches here now it's uh moving on from that i think it's important to look here um it says here to mention a few points if xyz is a set of facts brute uh relative to a description a then xyz is a set of range some set among which holds if a holds but the holding of some set among these does not necessarily entail a because exceptional circumstances can always make a difference and what our exceptional circumstance relatively to a can generally only be explained by giving a few diverse examples and no theoretically adequate provision can be made for exceptional circumstances since a further special context can theoretically always be imagined that would reinterpret any special context so here she's talking about extenuating circumstances special context and saying that you just can't have any theoretically adequate provision for any of these types of um extenuating circumstances so to speak um so like you know we can have some generalizations but there's always going to be exceptions to the rule and no theory is going to be able to account for those all right moving on to four she says so in spite of their strong associations i believe building injustice and dishonesty in a merely factual way i conceive of them in a merely factual way that i can do this for bill king is obvious enough justice i have no idea how to define except that its fear is that of actions which relate to someone else but injustice its defect can for the moment be offered as a generic name covering various species example bilking theft slander adultery punishment and of the innocent and so on uh later on she says for the proof that an unjust man is a bad man would require a positive account of justice as a virtue this part of the subject matter of ethics is however completely closed to us until we have an account of what type of characteristic a virtue is a problem not of ethics but of conceptual analysis and how it relates to the actions in which it is instanced a matter which i think aristotle did not succeed in really making clear for this we certainly need an account of at least of what a human action is at all and how its description of doing such and such is affected by its motive and by the intention or intentions in it and for this an account of such concepts is required so again this is why she's going to talk about the importance of a philosophy of psychology um and this is kind of her argument for that that you know we can't talk about what type of characteristic of virtue is until we have this adequate understanding of a philosophy of psychology and also from the previous uh paragraph you can also see where her uh virtue ethics release comes into play that she is a radical virtue ethicist saying that like we should give up on notions of right and wrong all together and instead just talk about things such as instead of that was a wrong thing for you to do we could say that was an unjust thing for you to do or a dishonest thing for you to do so moving on over here the ordinary and quite indispensable terms should needs on must acquire these this special sense by being equated in the relevant context which is obliged or is bound or is required to and a sense which one can be obliged or bound by law or something can be required by law so it's talking about time we were talking at least morally in this framework of should needs ought must um this is you know the equivalent of his obliged or his boundaries required to and this all comes from law and so if you don't have some sort of um divine law or natural law theory of ethics right then you can't really be using these terms because this is you know going on to her second thesis these are antiquated terms that are really just remnants or survivals of a law theory of ethics so then she talks about the history of it so how did this come about answers in history between aristotle and us came christianity with its law uh conception of ethics for christianity derived its ethical notions from the torah and then so you see that you know with judaism and with christianity um ethics is following divine law or divine commands and so from there and like the shaping of christianity for western ethics and for western philosophy writ large uh it is because of this remnant that even though you know a lot of philosophers uh do not uh no longer adhere to christianity or at least to divine command theory even if they are christian um it's still through this remnant in centuries of this formation of philosophy and especially of ethics that they still hold on to terms such as uh obligation right or needs or should or ought and you know these are words that make sense in a divine command or divine law theory or even a natural law theory but they just don't make sense when we're talking about something like consequentialism or deontology or virtue ethics especially so moving down here the blanket term illicit unlawful meaning much of the same as our blanket term wrong explains itself it is interesting that aristotle did not have such a blanket term he has blanket terms for wickedness uh he calls them villains or scoundrels but of course a man is not a villain or a scoundrel by the performance of one bad action or a few bad actions and he has terms like disgraceful and pious and specific terms signifying defect of the relevant virtue like unjust but no terms corresponding to elicit the extension of this term by the range of its application could be indicated in his terminology only by a quite lengthy sentence that is elicit which whether it is a thought or is a consented to passion or an action or an omission and thought or action is something contrary to one of the virtues the lack of which shows a man to be bad qua man meaning as or behaving or functioning as that formulation would yield a concept coextensive with the concept illicit so she's saying look this kind of idea of illicit or unlawful the closest thing we can get to that from like aristotelian ethics would be this long uh and lengthy sentence that she just gave and it's important to note again like being bad qua man uh remember that uh there's this talos right or this teleol teleology of uh aristotle where he's going to be or where he argued that you know we all have ends that we function as um so like the function of a cup is to hold liquid um that's its talos that's its end what it was made for and so you know uh similarly like a horse uh has this end to be horselike and man has its and to be man like and so what is it to be a man or a human being um well this is just to be you know what sets us apart uh this is that we are rational agents that we are rational animals and so to be uh good or to be bad as a man is either to live well into uh your rationality and um your co-extensiveness with one another and to be bad is to do the opposite of that so that's the importance of being bad quad man so you're bad at functioning as a human being um namely that you're not being rational you're not considerate of others um these things he thinks man's end is okay so a little bit lengthy there but um it's important to understand that especially when looking at aristotelian ethics so whenever we're talking about something like um i think he had this notion and uh i'm not sure maybe it was uh on animals but aristotle talks about something like a horse what it means for a horse to be good as a horse well it's that it can run fast can carry a lot of weight so on and so forth so if you have a horse that uh can't run fast or it's really weak um can't carry any weight um then it's functioning bad as a horse so all that is kind of this notion hopefully that'll help you understand this teleology and aristotelian ethics and how it functions in his virtue ethics so simply you know the virtues and uh aristotelian ethics is going to be things that um help us to do our part of acting good as human beings the function of man right that all people share all right so to have a long conception of ethics is hold the that what is needed for conformity with the virtues failure and which is a mark of being bad qua man and not merely say qua craftsman or logician you know so the difference here between being bad as a person versus being bad as a craftsman right we can say that someone sucks as a craftsman but there's still like a good person and that's what she's getting at here that what is needed for this is required by divine law naturally it's not possible to have such a conception unless you believe in god as a law giver like jews stoics and christians but if such a conception is dominant for many centuries and then is given up it is a natural result that the concept concepts of obligation of being bound or required as by a law should remain though they had lost their root and if the word aunt has become invested in certain contexts of the sense of obligation it too will remain to be spoken with a special emphasis and special feeling in the in these contexts so again this is her historical account of why we have these terms they're rooted in divine command theory but then when you give up divine command theory even though it's taken such root in the history and the culture um it's something that you can't give up all of it at once and so you have these remnants like concepts of obligation that remain even though their original root is uh uprooted i guess for lack of better turn so moving on down here the situation if i am right was an interesting one of a survival of a concept outside the framework of thought that made it a really intelligible one and so now that you have the survival of this concept but not the framework that uh it comes from the concept is no longer intelligible it just doesn't make sense so that's her second main thesis right so moving on uh towards the top of six she says it would be possible to bring out a different point by inquiring about the transition from is to needs from the characteristics of an organism to the environment that it needs for example to say that it needs that environment is not to say for example that you want it to have that environment but that it won't flourish unless it has it certainly it all depends uh whether you want it to flourish as human would say but what all depends on whether you want it to flourish is whether the fact that it needs that environment or won't flourish without it has a slightest influence on your actions now that such and such ought to be or is needed is supposed to have an influence on your actions from which it seemed natural to infer that to judge that it ought to be was in fact to grant what you judged uh ought to be influenced on your actions and no amount of truth as to what is the case could possibly have a logical claim to have influence on your actions it is not judgment as such that sets us in motion but our judgment on how to get to do something we want hence it must be impossible to infer needs or ought to be from is so moving on here she says here then there is no necessary connection between what you can judge the plant needs and what you want but there is some sort of necessary connection between what you think you need and what you want the connection is a complicated one it is possible not to want something that you judge you need but example it is not possible never to want anything that you judge you need this however is not a fact about the meaning of the word to need but about the phenomenon of wanting so again philosophy of psychology hume's reasoning we might say in effect leads one to think it must be about the word to need or to be good for thus we find two problems already wrapped up in the remark about a transition from is to odd now supposing that we had clarified the relative bruteness of facts on the one hand and the notions involved in needing and flourishing on the other there would still remain a third point for following hume someone might say perhaps you have made out your point about the transition from is to os and from is to needs but only at the cost of showing o's and needs sentences to express a kind of truth a kind of facts and it remains impossible to infer morally ought from his sentences so this is again her just mainly taking the task this idea of morally odd and how like there's just no way of getting it without some sort of divine command theory and then right here she says something interesting for a verdict after all you need a law and a judge the reply might be made not at all uh for if there were a law and a judge who gave a verdict the question for us would be whether accepting that verdict is something that there is a verdict on this is an analogous uh an analog of an argument which is so frequently referred to as decisive if someone does have a divine law conception of ethics all the same he has to agree that he has to have a judgment that he ought that is morally ought to obey the divine law so his ethic is in exactly the same position as any other he merely has a practical major premise divine law ought to be obeyed where someone else has for example the greatest concept or the greatest happiness principle ought to be employed in all decisions so again you still have to make this judgment about which judgment to follow and then here when she's talking about morally aunt she says it would be most reasonable to drop it it has no reasonable sense outside the law conception of ethics they're not going to maintain such a conception and you can do uh ethics without it and is shown by the example of aristotle it would be a great improvement if instead of morally wrong one always named a genus such as untruthful unchaste unjust we should no longer ask whether doing something was wrong passing directly from the some description of an action to this notion we should ask whether for example it was unjust and the answer would sometimes be clear at once so again removing this idea of just and unjust and instead describing things as whether they were or right and wrong instead describing things as just or unjust or um kind or unkind you know these kinds of notions not morally right or morally wrong dispelling of this notion altogether over here on eight right around here she says further the roles of what are called moral principles and the motive duty have to be described the differences between good and morally good and right need to be explored and the special characteristics of ought sentences investigated such discussions generate an appearance of significant diversity of views where what is really significant is an overall similarity so this is her talking about how all english philosophers and all english ethicists are essentially the same you know they're saying these are the things we need to talk about and so it seems like there's this great disagreement right like what is it for there to be a moral principle or what is it to define morally good and right and so it's like oh there's this big contrast here but she's saying no like you're all agreeing to these same assumptions like instead what's significant is your overall similarity here uh over here uh she says now this is a significant thing for it means that all these philosophers are quite incompatible with the hebrew and christian ethic so to give a little bit of context what's happening in between here you know they're all the same for instance they all agree um that it is possible to kill the innocent as a means to any end whatsoever um and anyone that thinks otherwise is an error and so she's saying like look they all agree on that whatever their ethic is now this is a significant thing for it means that all these philosophies are quite incompatible with the hebrew christian ethic for it has been characteristic of that ethic to teach that there are certain things forbidden whatever consequences threaten such as choosing to kill the innocents for any purpose however good so you know with divine command theory you're going to have some moral prohibitions on actions regardless of consequences so the prohibition of certain things simply in virtue of their description of such and such a and identifiable kind of actions regardless of any further consequences it's certainly not the whole creep hebrew christian ethic but is a noteworthy feature of it and if every academic philosopher since cedric has written such a way as to exclude this ethic it would argue a certain provinciality of mind not to see this incompatibility as the most important fact about these philosophers and the differences between them as somewhat trifling by comparison so essentially they're all in their own bubble they all see themselves as you know widely unique and different but in reality it's just because they're um unique and different within their own you know tiny little sub species of um ethics and if they can't notice that then they're just living in this bubble so over here on ten she then says for in fact cedric's thesis leaves it to be quite impossible to estimate the badness of an action except in the light of expected consequences but it's though then you must uh estimate the badness and the light of the consequences you expect and so far that you can exculpate yourself from the actual consequences of the most disgraceful actions so long as you can make out a case for not having foreseen them so this is a big issue she sees for any sort of uh especially with sidrwick like consequentialism but only unforeseen consequences because then you could just free yourself by just saying like oh like how was i supposed to know this was going to happen and you can wiggle your way out of any sort of moral culpability so she says whereas i should contend that a man is responsible for the bad consequences of his bad actions but gets no credit for the good ones and contra wise is not responsible for the bad consequences of good actions so you know this is very similar to what we were talking about um with nagel a couple weeks ago all right so this last paragraph on 10 it is a necessary feature of consequentialism that it is a shallow philosophy so again she holds no punches here it's one thing i really appreciate about her writing for there are always borderline cases and ethics now if you're either an aristotelian or a believer in divine law you'll deal with the borderline case by considering whether doing such and such in such and such such circumstances is same murder or as an act of injustice and according as you decide it is or it isn't you judge it to be a thing to do or not this would be the method of casualty uh kazoo street i'm not quite sure i've only ever read it i've never heard it pronounced out loud i think it's kazoo street and while it may lead you to stretch a point on the circumference it will not permit you to destroy the center but if you're a consequential it's a question what is the right thing to do in such and such circumstances is a stupid one to raise the casualist raises such a question only to ask would it be permissible to do so and so would it be permissible not to do so and so only if it would not be permissible not to do so and so so saying it's not okay for you to withhold doing some action this would be the thing the thing to do otherwise uh though he may speak against some action he cannot prescribe any for in an actual case the circumstances beyond the ones imagined might suggest all sorts of possibilities and you can't know in advance what the possibilities are going to be now the consequentialist has no footing on which to say this would be permissible this not because by his own hypothesis it's not the consequences that are to decide and he has no business to pretend that he can lay down what possible twist a man could give doing this or that the most that he can say is a man must not bring about this or that he has no right to say uh he will in an actual case bring about such and such unless he intends to do so so this is her taking the task the issue uh especially that she sees with consequentialism all right moving on over here those who recognize the origins of the notions of obligation the emphatic moral ought and the divine uh law conception of ethics but who reject the notion of a divine legislator sometimes look uh about for the possibility of retaining a law conception without a divine legislator this search i think has some interest in it perhaps the the first thing to suggest is the norms of a society so she's saying look you can still have some sort of command theory or law theory of ethics without it being a divine command theory or divine law theory so maybe it's the norms of society but then she says one cannot be impressed by this data if one reflects what the norms of society can be like that legislation could be for oneself i reject as absurd whatever you do for yourself may be admirable but it's not legislating then moving on further down she says in fact rather generally it must be good for anyone to think perhaps in some way i can't see i may be on a bad path perhaps i'm hopelessly wrong in some essential way uh so this is her saying like this sort of socratic doubt of always questioning you know maybe i'm blinded by like which path i'm going maybe it's actually wrong um that's good and that we should regularly do that that's another method of her ethics so to speak uh the search for norms might lead to someone uh to look for laws of nature as if the universe were a legislator so this is you know moral laws of nature so it's almost as if the universe is the legislator but in the present day this is not likely to lead to good results it might lead to one to eat the weaker according to the laws of nature right survival of the fittest so maybe we don't want to base universal laws as you know moral laws there's another possibility here obligation may be contractual but what she says is also while it is clear that you can be subject to law that you at the very bottom here you do not acknowledge um and have not thought of as a law it does not seem reasonable to say that you can enter upon a contract without knowing what that you are doing so such ignorance is usually how to be destructive with the nature of a contract so contract theories don't really work because you know you're not necessarily aware of you being in a contract or that you got into a contract and almost all contract theory or contract law says if you unwillingly or unknowingly entered into a contract then contracts null so she's saying look this is a good reason to think it's not necessarily from a contractual obligation and this is also kind of similar to a lot of the issues that a lot of y'all raised with like rousseau right uh it might remain to look for norms in human virtues just as man has so many teeth which is certainly not the average number of teeth men have there's a number of teeth for the species so perhaps a species man regarded not just biologically but from the point of view of the activity of thought and choice in regard to the various departments of life powers and faculties and use of such of things needed has such and such virtues and this man with the complete set of virtues is the norm as man with example a complete set of teeth is a norm but in this sense norm has ceased to be roughly equivalent to law in this sense the notion of a norm brings us nearer to an aristotelian than a law conception of ethics so she's saying look if you try to do that you're basically going to get back to this aristotelian virtue ethics which is what she holds to all right so for 13. oh just kind of there we go all right at the top 13 she says all uh end by describing the advantages of using the word art in a non-emphatic uh fashion and not in a special moral sense of disregarding the term wrong in a moral sense and using such notions as unjust it is possible if one is allowed to proceed just by giving examples to distinguish between the intrinsically unjust and what is unjust given the circumstances so this is important distinctions humane makes something might be unjust given the circumstances but other actions are just intrinsically unjust so to arrange to get a man judicially punished for something uh which it can be clearly seen he has not done is intrinsically unjust so no matter the circumstances it is always unjust um for example to um clearly punish someone who is innocent what is unjust moving on down here give an example normal circumstances is to deprive people of their ostensible property with legal without legal procedure not to pay debts not to keep contracts and a host of other things of the kind now the circumstances can be clearly uh can clearly make a great deal of difference in estimating the justice or injustice of such procedures as these and these circumstances may sometimes include expected consequences for example a man's claim to a bit of property can become a nullity when its seizure and use can avert some obvious disaster so sometimes we care about the consequences and sometimes uh you know because of that like these circumstances will tell us whether something is just or unjust so seizing this person's land in order to save the rest of the town like that seems just right whereas just seizing someone's land for you know the hell of it that seems unjust so sometimes we care about the consequences here but in other things that are intrinsically unjust consequences never matter all right so moving on here the decision on particular cases would for the most part be determined uh kataton orton logone which is according to what's reasonable example that such and such a delay of payment of a such and such debt to a person so circumstance on the part of a person's circumstance what or would not be unjust is really only to be decided according to what's reasonable and for this there can be in principle no cannon other than giving a few examples that is to say while it is because of a big gap in philosophy that we can give no general account of the con concept of virtue you know the concept of justice again this is talking about a philosophy of psychology but have to proceed using these concepts only by giving examples so hey because we don't have these adequate concepts we don't have an adequate philosophy of psychology the next best thing we can do is just give some examples still there's an area which it is not because of any gap but is in principle the case that there is no account except by way of examples and that is where the canon is what's reasonable which of course is not a canon so sometimes talking about what the right thing to do is uh we can only talk about what's reasonable and if we're talking about what's reasonable we can say like well in this kind of circumstance it seems reasonable in this kind of circumstance it doesn't seem reasonable and so sometimes we're gonna have to talk about circumstances all right so no circumstances and no expected consequences which do not modify the description of the procedure as one of justice or judicially punishing a man for what he has known not to have done can modify the description of it as unjust someone who attempted to dispute this would only be pretending not to know what unjust means for this is a paradigm case of injustice you know simply to punish an innocent person is just like what it means or it's one of the most paradigm cases of what unjust means so it can never be just to do so otherwise you're talking about something other than injustice and maybe what you want to say is it's morally permissible or something to talk about do allowing something to be an unjust action to happen but then you're not talking about unjust you're talking about moral right and wrong you're going back to moral law theory and so again this is why she's saying look let's give up on the notion of what is right and what's wrong and just talk about things like this is just this is unjust maybe you would want an unjust thing to happen but it's still unjust all right and here we see the superiority of the term unjust over the term morally right and morally wrong for the context of english moral philosophy sincidwick it appears legitimate to discuss whether it might be morally right in some circumstances to adopt that procedure but it cannot be argued that the procedure would in any circumstances be just so again like you might be able to argue that it's morally right to do so or not but no one is going to be able to argue that it's just so she's saying look here's the reason why unjust is a superior term to use than morally right or morally wrong now that i'm not able to do philosophy involved and i think that no one can in the present situation of english philosophy can do the philosophy involved but it's clear that a good man is a just man and a just man is a man who habitually refuses to commit or participate and any unjust actions for fear of any consequences or to obtain advantage for himself or anyone else perhaps no one will disagree but all be said what is unjust is sometimes determined by expected consequences and certainly that is true but there are cases where it is not now if someone says i agree but all this wants a lot of explaining then he is right and what is more the situation at present is that we can't do the explaining we lack the philosophical equipment but if someone really thinks in advance that it is open to question whether such an action as procuring the judicial execution of the innocent should be quite excluded from consideration i don't want to argue with him he shows a corrupt mind so here onward is really where you're going to see her lay out in full terms like what her ethic is and what she thinks the limit of ethics is in such cases are more or moral philosophers seek to impose a dilemma upon us if we have a case where the term unjust applies purely in virtue of a factual description can't one raise the question whether one sometimes conceivably ought to do injustice if what is unjust is determined by considerations of what is right to do so and so in such in such circumstances then the question whether it's right to commit injustice can't arise just because wrong has been built into the definition of injustice so if you claim the definition of justice is what is right then you can't do injustice or it can't be right to do injustice because injustice would be the opposite of right it's wrong so it makes no sense to use it in these terms but if we have a case where the description unjust applies purely in virtue of the facts without bringing wrong in then the question can arise whether one ought perhaps to commit an injustice whether it might not be right to and of course ought and right are being used in their moral senses here now either you must decide what is morally right in the light of the certain other principles or you can make a principle about this and decide that an injustice is never right but even if you do the latter you're going beyond the facts you're making a decision that you will not or that it is wrong to commit injustice but in either case of the term in unjust is determined simply by the facts it is not the term unjust that determines the term wrong applies here but a decision that unjustice is wrong together with the diagnosis of the factual description as entailing justice so this is again why she's saying we should give up on these moral notions of morally right and morally wrong or morally ought to um and in fact you're going way above and beyond the mere facts here instead you're making your own determination here that injustice is wrong um but that goes beyond philosophy that goes beyond ethics that's just your own personal view right you aren't able we're limited because of our philosophy of psychology to actually give a good reason why that would be the case but the man who makes an absolute decision that injustice is wrong has no footing on which to criticize someone who does not make that decision decision as judging falsely kind of what i just said right there all right we're almost done i swear thanks for holding in for those that have i want to read a good chunk of this paragraph right here starting with now let us redeem that morally wrong is the term which is the heir of the notion illicit or that there is an obligation not to do which belongs in the divine law theory of ethics here it really does add something to the description unjust to say that there is an obligation not to do it for what obliges is the divine law as rules oblige in a game so the divine law obliges not to commit injustice by forbidding injustice it really does add something to the description unjust to say there is an obligation not to do it it is because morally wrong is the error of this concept but an error that is cut off from the family of concepts from which it sprang that morally wrong both goes beyond the mere factual description unjust and seems to have no discernible content except a certain compelling force which i should call purely psychological so if you remove it from divine law theory um then all that is going to be is a certain compelling force and that's purely a psychological thing and we don't have the philosophy of psychology in order to understand that um but yeah i think this goes to show a good reason of showing why morally wrong or moral obligation does make sense if it's a law-based ethic but by removing laws or a law-based ethic it really doesn't make sense to talk about obligation so over here she says sorry about that it may be possible if we are resolute to discard the notion morally ought and simply return to the ordinary art which we ought to notice is such an extremely frequently term frequent term of human language that is difficult to imagine getting on without it now if we do return to it can it reasonably be asked whether one might ever need to commit injustice or whether it won't be the best thing to do of course it can and the answers will be various one man a philosopher might say that since injustice there's that since justice is a virtue an injustice of ice and virtues and vices are built by the performance of the action and which they are instants and act of injustice will tend to make a man bad and essentially the flourishing of a man as a man consists in his being good example in virtues but for any x which such terms apply x needs what makes it flourish so man needs or ought to perform only virtuous actions even if as it must be admitted may happen he flourishes less or not at all and in in essentials by avoiding uh injustice his life is spoiled and essential by not avoiding injustice so he still needs to perform only just actions that's roughly how plato and aristotle talk but it can be seen that philosophically there is a huge gap at present unfillable as far as we are concerned which needs to be filled by an account of human nature human action and the type of characteristic a virtue is and above all of human flourishing okay so there's a lot to unpack there but mainly she's saying look maybe we don't talk about what's what you morally ought to do but instead maybe we can just talk about what you ought to do right because on such a common and frequently used term it makes sense in human language and she's saying like you know well is that possible yeah of course and then she lays it all out here like what a philosopher might say and she's saying look that's just aristotelian or platonic ethics uh that is their virtue ethics the ancient greek virtue ethics to talk about art but not have this moral baggage of so it's not like you morally ought to do it it's that you want to do it for this aim or such and such or the aim to be as a man or as a human being um so you can still talk about what you ought to do without having to say what you are morally obligated to do or morally ought to do and that's just getting you back again to aristotelian virtue ethics but then she talks about again the gap that we have in philosophy of psychology because at present we're un uh there's this huge gap unfillable as far as we're concerned which needs to be filled by an account of human nature human action and the type of characteristic of virtue is and above all human flourishing so if you can define these four concepts then maybe this will actually start to make sense and that's mostly it but i do just kind of want to read this final paragraph here it is left to modern moral philosophy the moral philosophy of all well-known english ethicists and sedgwick to construct systems according to which the man who says we need such and such and will only get it this way may be a virtuous character that is to say it is left open to debate whether such a procedure as a judicial punishment of the innocent may not in some circumstances be the right one to adopt and though the present oxford moral philosophers would accord a man permission to make it his principle not to do such a thing they teach a philosophy according to which the particular consequences of such an action could morally be taken into account by a man who is debating what to do and if they were such as to conflict with his ends it might be a step in his moral education to frame a moral uh principle under which he managed to bring the action or it might be a new decision of principle which was uh in advance in the formation of his moral thinking to decide and such in such circumstances one ought to procure the judicial condemnation of the innocent and that is my complaint so she's saying look like you're able to talk around these things and use these terms of permission and like what uh you might morally ought to do by looking at the consequences where you can come around and say like yeah like it's no words right in these circumstances that you ought to uh condemn the innocent person and that's just not right that's flat out a non-starting point for anscombe and so this is her complaint and what she's done in the past 15 16 pages is clearly lay out why she has this complaint anyways guys that's it for today that's it for amscom i really like her um i think that she does a really interesting job of one taking the task which she sees as clear issues she brings a really fresh and unique perspective again she's like the reason that virtue ethics really became a thing again and i think it's a great defense of virtue ethics here so that's why i wanted to bring it to your attention again if you have any questions please feel free to email me throw them in the questions and takeaways uh discussion board and i'll see you all on tuesday