Modern Moral Philosophy

Anscombe was a devout Catholic and a Thomist; the paper's central indictment — that "moral ought" is unintelligible without divine law — depends on a Thomistic-Aristotelian conception of ethics rooted in human nature and divine command.

"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 some description of an action to this notion; we should ask whether, e.g., it was unjust." (Modern Moral Philosophy)

The article's method is paradigm mid-century analytic philosophy: close conceptual analysis of "ought," "duty," and "moral," tracking the historical genealogy of those terms and showing where they cease to function.

"The terms 'should' or 'ought' or 'needs' relate to good and bad: e.g., machinery needs oil, or should or ought to be oiled, in that running without oil is bad for it, or it runs badly without oil." (Modern Moral Philosophy)

The call for a renewed "philosophy of psychology" — closer attention to the descriptive textures of intentional action, motive, and pleasure — is continuous with the phenomenological tradition Anscombe knew through Wittgenstein.

"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, the type of characteristic a virtue is, and above all of human 'flourishing.'" (Modern Moral Philosophy)

Anscombe is a moral realist of an Aristotelian-Thomistic kind: facts about human flourishing, the virtues, and intentional action constitute the substance of ethics; they are not projections of attitude.

"To say a man needs an environment is nothing but to say that something is required for him to function as a human being." (Modern Moral Philosophy)

Practical reason — Aquinas's "prudentia" — is restored to the centre of moral life as the capacity that integrates the particulars of action with the universals of human flourishing.

"It is not at all clear that the terms 'morally right' or 'morally wrong' do, or could be made to, mean anything precise enough to be of philosophical use." (Modern Moral Philosophy)

The proposal to set aside "moral" vocabulary and return to specific virtue-and-vice descriptions (unjust, untruthful, unchaste) is pragmatically realist — let the action-descriptions do the moral work.

"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 of philosophical psychology that needs treatment quite independent of moral philosophy." (Modern Moral Philosophy)