Anscombe's Moral Philosophy by Richter Duncan;

Author:Richter, Duncan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

According to Pigden, Anscombe’s idea that we should abandon moral philosophy until we have done enough philosophy of psychology to allow us to work out how an unjust man or act is a bad one, in other words, to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is,’ is only plausible if we accept her view of the moral ‘ought.’ On the standard view, after all, there is no point in trying to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ because we know this to be impossible. Her view of the moral ‘ought’ is that it makes no sense because it is an essentially Catholic Christian concept transplanted into a modern, secular context. So to defeat these two theses it is enough to show that the history of the moral ‘ought’ is other than Anscombe takes it to be. But Anscombe’s thoughts on the cause of the problem are speculative. Her main claim is that contemporary philosophers use words such as ‘ought’ in bad ways. Nothing about Cicero can disprove this. If Anscombe is making much the same claim about ‘ought’ as Wittgenstein made, after all, then it is noteworthy that there is nothing historical in what Wittgenstein is reported to have said. It is true that Anscombe’s history is questionable (I am not saying that it is wrong). It is not true that this matters much except to historians and, perhaps, Catholic propagandists (of whom Anscombe was undoubtedly one). But if the best defense that I can offer of Anscombe’s history is that it is irrelevant to her main point, then we should perhaps return to that point.

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