Elizabeth Anscombe Quotes on Virtue
G. E. M. Anscombe's Modern Moral Philosophy (1958) opened the modern revival of virtue ethics with the claim that the central concepts of post-Kantian moral philosophy — moral obligation, moral duty, moral right — make sense only within a divine-command framework that the secular philosophers using the vocabulary had implicitly abandoned. Without that framework the proper alternative is Aristotelian virtue ethics organized around the analysis of the human good, and modern moral philosophy should accordingly be set aside until an adequate philosophy of psychology can supply the missing background. The earlier Intention (1957) supplied that philosophy of action, and the framework Anscombe articulated shaped the subsequent work of Foot, Geach, MacIntyre, Hursthouse, and the broader contemporary virtue-ethics revival.
Quotes
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Attributed to Elizabeth Anscombe:
“The notion of moral obligation, in any quasi-legal sense, has no purchase outside a divine law conception of ethics.”
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Attributed to Elizabeth Anscombe:
“It is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy.”
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Attributed to Elizabeth Anscombe:
“An action is intentional under a description.”
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Attributed to Elizabeth Anscombe:
“We cannot in principle dispense with the concept of human flourishing in moral evaluation.”
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“The denial of any distinction between foreseen and intended consequences, as far as responsibility is concerned, was not made by Sidgwick in developing any one 'method of ethics'; he made this important move on behalf of everybody and just on its own account; and I think it plausible to suggest that this move on the part of Sidgwick explains the difference between old-fashioned Utilitarianism and the consequentialism, as I name it, which marks him and every English academic moral philosopher since him.”
Here Anscombe coined the word "consequentialism". -
“Christian life meant a separation from the standards of that world: you couldn't be a Baal-worshipper, you couldn't sacrifice to idols, be a sodomite, practice infanticide, compatibly with the Christian allegiance. That is not to say that Christians were good; we humans are a bad lot and our lives as Christians even if not blackly and grossly wicked are usually very mediocre.”
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