Theses
The beginning of the paper summarizes its main points:I will begin by stating three theses which I present in this paper. The first is that it is 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 concepts 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 'ought', ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; because they 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 that the differences between the well-known English writers on moral philosophy from Sidgwick to the present day are of little importance.Onora O'Neill said that "the connections between these three thoughts are not immediately obvious, but their influence is not in doubt", and that "many exponents of virtue ethics take Anscombe's essay as a founding text and have endorsed all three thoughts", whereas "many contemporary consequentialists and theorists of justice, who may reasonably be thought the heirs of the 'modern moral philosophy' that Anscombe criticized, have disputed or disregarded all three".
Coinage of "consequentialism"
In "Modern Moral Philosophy", Anscombe coined the term "consequentialism" to mark a distinction between theories of English moral philosophers from Sidgwick onward ("consequentialists") and theories of earlier philosophers. According to Anscombe, the modern "consequentialist" moral philosophers were distinguished from the earlier ones by that their theories allow actions, once they fall under a moral principle or (secondary) rule, to be treated, in practical deliberation, ''as if they were consequences''—objects of maximization and weighing—, such that an unjust act, in spite of being generally prohibited and, prima facie, wrong under one aspect, might, nevertheless, be, all things considered, right, if it produces the greatest balance of happiness, or balance of prima facie rightness over prima facie wrongness. In consequentialism, so construed, there are no actions which are absolutely ruled out in advance of deliberation; everything might, in principle, be outweighed in some circumstances. Anscombe's goal was to advance an objection against all theories with this property. As a result of this conception of consequentialism, Anscombe explicitly classified J.S. Mill as a nonconsequentialist and W.D. Ross as a consequentialist, since she thought that Mill's theories did not allow for this, whereas Ross's did. However, from a contemporary perspective, Mill and Ross would be classified the other way round—Mill as a consequentialist, and Ross as a nonconsequentialist. This is not because people have come to think that J.S. Mill satisfies the property that Anscombe thought was distinctive of modern consequentialists, and that W.D. Ross does not; rather, it is because the meaning of the word " consequentialism" has changed over time.Reception
According to M.J. Richter, "Kurt Baier describes the paper as 'widely discussed and much admired' and Peter Winch has called one of its three theses 'enormously influential' within moral philosophy." John Wardle argued that Anscombe misrepresentedSee also
*" The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories"References
Sources
Further reading
*''Virtue Ethics'', edited by Roger Crisp and Michael Slote, Oxford, 1997. *Alasdair MacIntyre, '' After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory'', London, 1985 (2nd ed.). {{ISBN, 0-268-00611-3. 1958 documents Academic journal articles Works by Elizabeth Anscombe Works originally published in Philosophy (journal) 1958 essays Ethics essays Philosophy papers