No Morality, No Self: Anscombe's Radical Skepticism by James Doyle (review)

The book is devoted to an examination of Anscombe's two skeptical critiques of the vocabulary of morality: one that appeared in Philosophy, volume 33 (1958), under the title "Modern Moral Philosophy," and the other in a volume edited by S. D. Guttenplan entitled Mind and Language (1975). The second essay, entitled "First Person," was devoted to an understanding of "I" as a referring expression. Both essays were widely read in British analytic circles and widely commented upon. In this volume, James Doyle, professor of philosophy at Harvard University, tracks the discussion that followed over the years and gives Anscombe a sympathetic reading.

Morality, for Anscombe, is a philosopher's fiction, but it is not only a philosopher's fiction. The term is everywhere in our culture. Anscombe thinks that it was the pseudoconcept of "morality" that has made consequentialism possible—a widely accepted justification of Hiroshima and countless other modern horrors.

The concepts of "obligation" and "duty," and what is morally right and wrong, and the moral sense of "ought" should be jettisoned, she holds, if this is psychologically possible, because they are survivors of an earlier conception of ethics that no longer prevails and are useless without it.

Anscombe was writing in a period when the belief in a divinely created universe was losing its hold on an English intellectual class, but in a class that still held on to concepts such as "moral obligation," "duty," and "ought." Those concepts, she argued, are based on a metaphysics that is no longer accepted, or are derived without acknowledgement of their Hebrew, Stoic, and Christian sources. Moral notions have their origin in a divine lawgiver. Absent belief in God as a lawgiver, there is no ought. She agrees with David Hume that "ought" cannot be inferred from experience and cannot be derived from indicative sentences.

In a sweeping condemnation of modern moral philosophy, she maintains, "English philosophers from Henry Sedgwick to present day are of little importance, given that they are all consequentialists in some form or another." Consequentialism, as the name implies, holds that an action or policy derives its moral worth from is likely consequences. The same outlook is characteristic of the moral philosophy that goes by the name of "deontology," "expressivist," and "virtue ethics."

Doyle recognizes Anscombe's point and then asks, "Might there be some secular account of norms that affords us a way of recurring to the idea of moral obligation?"

"Moral" has lost its meaning, Anscombe insists, given the rise of secular culture in the West. It has become a pseudoconcept. Nor should it be understood as a sui generis category. Aristotle seems to have gotten by without any recourse to the concept of "moral." It is significant that Aristotle has no blanket term for wrongdoing, like "illicit." Following his lead, Anscombe writes, "Instead of saying morally wrong we should say, untruthful, unjust, unchaste, or pass directly to a description." Moral philosophy depends on a philosophical psychology absent in modern moral philosophy. Yet the notion has survived as a concept outside the framework of thought that makes it intelligible. She asks, "Why do we have our concept of morality, with its notions of obligations that make no reference to our interests?" The answer is Christianity. Christianity derived its ethical conceptions from the Torah and conceived ethics in terms of divine commands.

In the essay "First Person," Anscombe holds that the function in language of the first-person pronoun is not to infer an object. If it were a referring expression, the only thing it could be referring to would be something like a Cartesian ego or nonphysical soul or mind. She continues, "The reason why David Hume sought unsuccessfully for his self (finding instead only a bundle of impression and ideas) is that there is no self, nothing to which 'I' refers, not anything, (not even a bundle). 'I' does not refer to anything I might see or sense in any other way...