Work Classification Layer
Compare Works
Pick two or more works to set their attribute fingerprints, dimension-by-dimension passages, and shared school embodiments side by side. Especially useful for author-stage comparisons (Wittgenstein early vs late) and for setting a single tradition's foundational texts against each other.
Modern Moral Philosophy
Modern moral philosophy should be set aside until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology — and a "moral ought" without divine law is incoherent
Attribute Fingerprint
Rows where works disagree are highlighted in gold. The full ontology grid is shown.
| Attribute | Modern Moral Philosophy (Mature (the journal paper that reshaped Anglophone moral philosophy)) |
|---|---|
| Time · Extent | Infinite |
| Time · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Time · Grain | Continuous |
| Time · Freedom | Non-Deterministic |
| Time · Traversability | Linear |
| Time · Dimensionality | One |
| Time · Direction | Uni-directional |
| Space · Extent | Infinite |
| Space · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Space · Curvature | Flat |
| Space · Dimensionality | Three |
| Space · Locality | Local |
| Matter · Extent | Infinite |
| Matter · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Matter · Conservation | Conserved |
| Matter · Dimensionality | Three |
| Matter · Locality | Local |
| Observer · Time Instance | Single |
| Observer · Space Instance | Single |
| Observer · Knowledge Extent | Partial |
| Observer · Knowledge Retainment | Total |
| Observer · Physicality | Embodied |
| Observer · Agency | Both |
| Observer · Number | Plural |
| Observer · Metaphysical Agency | Personal |
| Observer · Moral Authority | Scripture |
| Observer · Theological Method | — |
| Energy · Extent | Infinite |
| Energy · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Energy · Conservation | Conserved |
| Energy · Dispersibility | Irreversible |
| Information · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Information · Cosmic Conservation | Conserved |
| Information · Personal Conservation | Conserved |
| Information · Granularity | Continuous |
Dimension-by-Dimension Evidence
What each work's passages reveal about its stance on each of the six dimensions.
Time
Modern Moral Philosophy
The history of ethics from Aristotle through Aquinas to Sidgwick is the diagnostic narrative — modern moral vocabulary is the late residue of a Christian moral framework whose theological foundations have been removed.
Space
Modern Moral Philosophy
The "space" of the paper is the Anglophone analytic-ethics community of the 1950s, treated as a single sociological-philosophical formation Anscombe wants to puncture.
Matter
Modern Moral Philosophy
Embodied human nature — what creatures of our biological-rational kind require to flourish — is the substrate on which any genuine ethics must be built.
Observer
Modern Moral Philosophy
The agent of intentional action — described in the precise vocabulary of Anscombe's 1957 monograph Intention — is the moral subject; the disengaged "moral spectator" is rejected.
Energy
Modern Moral Philosophy
The energies of intentional action — desire, motive, want, pleasure — need careful philosophy of psychology before they can support ethics.
Information
Modern Moral Philosophy
Discrete virtue-and-vice descriptions (unjust, untruthful, unchaste) carry the moral content that empty "moral ought" cannot.
Internal Tensions
Where each work's argument pulls against itself.
The paper has been criticised on every front. Some readers (Foot, Hursthouse) accepted the virtue-ethics turn but rejected the divine-law claim; others (Hare, Williams) defended a non-theological "moral ought"; secular virtue-theorists (MacIntyre in After Virtue, 1981) tried to recover Anscombe's diagnostic without her theology. Anscombe's own subsequent work — particularly her notorious defence of absolute prohibition in "Mr Truman's Degree" (1957, on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and her opposition to contraception — made clear that the 1958 paper's position is part of a thoroughly Catholic ethics, not a generic call for virtue.