Nice thread . Good stuff so far. Earlier there was a distinction drawn between modus tollens readings and modus ponens ones.

The following is her second theses, and it strikes me as intriguing...

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 be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible.

What if it were the case that it is not psychologically possible to dispense with those linguistic devices; the accepted uses of those terms?

Is Anscombe in search of a theory of mind which results in just that?

In certain situations, say... when one promises to plant a rose garden on Sunday and nothing else unexpected happens to stop the plan, how can we dispense with the resultant thought and/or belief that there ought be a rose garden on Monday?

Is this a moral ought?

I think you've read another article.
Anscombe raises the problem of abandoning the classic heteronomous morality: the theist. And he explicitly rejects the autonomous ethics for excelence: the Kantian one.
The issue is not that people say it's moral, but what philosophers say it's moral. The Anglo-Saxons and Aristotle.

What if it were the case that it is not psychologically possible to dispense with those linguistic devices; the accepted uses of those terms? — creativesoul

Is Anscombe in search of a theory of mind which results in just that? — creativesoul

Of course she is; she's a Thomist (Natural Law).

There are no gaps.
Object (perceived particular)-Subject (cognised particular), Is (fact)-Ought (value), and Being (character)-Doing (act) are convenient epistemological distinctions which are ontological unities.

nn

Spelling mistake. I know she is a woman.

Moral unanimity is almost non-existent and therefore useless for solving moral problems.
Because it is enough for someone to say "no" for the rule to be called into question.

I don't see why we could not simply accept courage as worthy in itself. — Banno

For lo, it is written in The Jungle Book, that Mowgli shall learn the courage of the tiger, the loyalty of the wolf, the cunning of the snake, the sociality of the monkey, and the strength of the bear, and shall become king of the jungle with the virtues of all.

I don't see why we could not equally accept cowardice as a virtue. We could call it 'discretion', the virtue of the stick insect. Is not a virtue simply a characteristic that works in terms of survival? a way of life?

I think you have passed too quickly on to virtue, and neglected what I think is fundamental to the psychology - conflict, between ought and want, or good and evil, or personal and social, or...

But meanwhile -- is it not clear that there are several concepts that need investigating simply as part of the philosophy of psychology and, as I should recommend -- banishing ethics totally from our minds? Namely -- to begin with: "action", "intention", "pleasure", "wanting". — A

One takes wanting for granted as a motive, but it is a curious affair. The physics of it is strange because the cause seems to come after the event. I want ice cream because it pleases me, but the pleasure seems to be projected backwards in time to become the motive force that gets me to go to the ice cream parlour. Of course a little reflection inclines one to say that it is not the great taste of the ice cream that one has not had that impels one to the parlour, but the memory and image of the great taste one has had yesterday and last week.

And as soon as one sees that one is motivated always by images of consequences and never by consequences themselves, one starts to see things somewhat differently in ethics too.

If my objective is, goto Yeovil, going to London is immoral. I ought to keep on the roads which lead to Yeovil. Therefore, morality is.

There is also subjective morality; I think my organism is doing a good job with my existence but that may not be good for others.

Should we banish morality? No. We'll destablize.

I think you have passed too quickly on to virtue, and neglected what I think is fundamental to the psychology - conflict, between ought and want, or good and evil, or personal and social, or... — unenlightened

And as soon as one sees that one is motivated always by images of consequences and never by consequences themselves, one starts to see things somewhat differently in ethics too. — unenlightened

Agreed.
1) Conscience may be overruled by competing incentives (e.g., desires, passions, etc.) resulting in a decision to select an immoral course of action.
2) Want = unnecessary desire, a propositional attitude having World-to-Mind Direction of Fit (World-to-Fit-Mind), or world actualisation intent.

Rubbish. — Banno

Well, I thought I'd add my two cents worth to your thread. As expected, you've deemed it not worth two cents. You owe me nothing though, because I offered it freely, and gifted it, as a virtue act. Virtue does not impose debt. I'm sure you are acquainted with the Christian use of the word "love". There is nothing owed for an act of love.

However, the fact that you think we can simply "step over" the infinite regress involved in justifying particular virtues, by suggesting that virtues do not need to be justified, is an indication of the pathetic state of modern moral philosophy.

Why not just say that courage is worthy of cultivation - and if you disagree, that's not a fact about courage, but a fact about you. — Banno

I hope you can see, that in order for the saying "courage is worthy of cultivation", to be accepted, we need a description of what constitutes "courage". And this description must cast the described thing, which is to be called "courage", in a positive light. That way it is acceptable as something which is worthy as cultivation. This is why Aristotle produced 'the doctrine of the mean', as a way of showing how to give the named virtue a positive description, making it something worthy of cultivation. Notice that not only is the courageous person not cowardly, but is also not rash. Otherwise "courage" might be conceived as rashness and therefore not something worthy of cultivation. So his technique, which may or may not be adequate (notice that "mean" has now developed bad, vicious, connotations) was to place the virtue between two extremes each being a vise.

Well, the point of virtue ethics was to avoid rules, so... — Banno

Can't you see that this is futile? Just like we need rules of definition, to determine what constitutes a punishable act like "murder", or "theft", we also need rules of definition as to what constitutes a virtuous act. The real difference is that it is a far better enterprise, to determine rules concerning what is "good", and encourage people to act accordingly, then to determine rules concerning what is bad, and punish people accordingly. The former gives us guidance, encouraging us to stay away from bad behaviour while the latter gives us punishment for bad behaviour without any guidance. The problem, is that it is easier to determine the essence of a bad act than the essence of a good act.

The problem, is that it is easier to determine the essence of a bad act than the essence of a good act. — Metaphysician Undercover

How do we determine the essence of a bad act?

We stipulate what is the character, or nature, of a bad act. It is harmful to another, or it infringes on another's rights, something like that. A virtuous act is not simply the opposite of a bad act.

Right, so not harming anyone isn't necessarily virtuous, but a lot of virtue appears to be in what you're not doing:

"Love is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; 5 does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; 6 does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; 7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8 Love has no fear; it does not worry; love keeps no records of wrongs; never fails."

8 doesn't complain after, 'all we were was a good performance'.

As far as the law goes, it's predicated on harm or damages.

(Not "pain" as some erroneously state; using "pain" as a measure for harm would also lead to absurdism and strict "non-aggression arguments"

For example, speaking in a public place created sound waves which "aggress" upon another's ear without consent, and cause a small amount of "pain"; or likewise, heathy activities such as exercising or playing sports cause "pain" to the self as well as the participants, but since it is a consensual activity done for enjoyment, it is not considered illegal or immoral).

For example, the same physical act done in a boxing match or a legal form of sports or recreation, if done without consent to a stranger (e.x. striking an innocent bystander) would be illegal because it's a form of assault against another without consent, and potentially causes measurable harm (e.x. a broken bone, death, etc).

Yep. You are right.

I don't agree. If the vast majority of people, cross-culturally, think that a quality is virtuous, then it is virtuous. Likewise if such a majority thinks an act is wrong, say murder or rape, for example, then it is wrong. Absolute unanimity is not required, because perverse outliers can be disregarded.

I don't see why we could not equally accept cowardice as a virtue. We could call it 'discretion', the virtue of the stick insect. — unenlightened

Now you're being silly; cowardice is not discretion, just as courage is not foolhardiness, and everyone who is capable of thinking about it even superficially knows that.

I was all hopped up to read to the end of the essay tonight & dip back into the convo but my isp went and had an outage.My phones too too tiny to read an essay so i am cast out of the ethical pale until the utilities resume.

Internet's back up!

Allegorically, plants need water and sunlight because of what plants are. If moral philosophy was done by plants, maybe a Hume plant would have written that: "Whenever I have occasioned to find a treatise regarding our affairs, I have observed a transition from the usual copulations of propositions like "is a water requiring organism" and "does not survive without water" to "ought to absorb water " and "ought not station themselves in an arid landscape" which express a new affirmation of a different sort. Wherefrom this new type of affirmations are deduced from their precedents despite this difference in character I cannot conceive".

Such a plant could be alleged to engender a discourse about plant morality that concerned the operation of the word "ought" severed from the context of how plants behave and develop; more concerned with an abstract rule of application of these words to statements of fact regarding plant behaviour and development. Anscombe would want the plants to talk about how they need water because of their metabolic requirements than about a moral logic operating on statements of facts concerning plants.

So part of the appeal to moral psychology is to explain why such a move appears to make sense; and Anscombe finds this in divine law and legalist accounts of moral obligation, in historical context. But, Anscombe suggests, such motivating contexts have long since lost their ability to furnish our understanding of morality, and that moral philosophers simply have not kept up with the times. More specifically, legalistic/contractual and divine law conceptions of morality stymie the formation of any conception of morality which is tethered to real life rather than dead metaphors; and moral philosophy in the criticised senses has replaced these dead metaphors with philosophical principles that function to fill void left by this death. — fdrake

I both agree & disagree. In both agreeing & disagreeing, I might ultimately be agreeing, but let me smooth some creases, for my own sake. And then ask if I've missed your already smoothing the same.

At this moment (I can't remember what I said about this in past posts) I take Anscombe to be identifying both similarities and differences between people and plants. The is-needss unites men & plants. But the is-wants and is-oughts of men still drive a wedge.

We can re-vegetate these is-wants and is-oughts by imagining man in a relationship with a law-giving god, similar to the relationship of a plant to sunlight and water. In this circumstance, it's not all that different.

But Anscombe does admit a difference between wanting and needing. And it's exactly in this place where she can talk about wanting against your needs, or something retaining 'mesmeric force.' We can still want something that's now an outmoded need & that opens up a new ethical dimenstion. I don't know to what extent this plays a conscious role in Anscombe, but she's for sure identified the role of desire to rupture a life-form from a smooth intercourse with the world (as the plant has with water and sunlight, or the moral man with paying the butcher.) A plant, presumably, can't become bewitched by a 'mesmeric force' (though, thinking about it, maybe it can? But can it reflect on that force as a 'mesmeric force'?)

I believe @unenlightened has touched on some of this as well, but I haven't had a good chance to read his posts through thoroughly. Same to you. But I do think it's important that this Wandering Want erupts at this specific place in the text, right in the middle, between the two major argumentative blocks.

tldr: an 'ought' can go against need. And the 'mesmeric force' of these oughts seems to lie in exactly that. Anscombe seems not simply to deny those oughts in favor of an immanent moral field, but to cautiously give them some latitude. The obligation to, e.g., a Yahweh, might vanish, but the 'want' larva that falls out of its chrysalis is still there and pulsing - just needs to be rethought outside the law-relationship, rethought after sloughing the dead-skin 'ought' structure that characterizes both deontology and consequentialism - or something like that.

Summary post:

Anscombe describes Moore & his ilk - for them, 'right action' is the action that produces the best consequences. Anscombe admits there's a great deal of subtlety to many of the post-mooreans. But, in the end, it's all the same. (I want to come back to this point of the essay after finally summarizing.)

For post-mooreans, consequences always ultimately override the ethical valence of an act in-and-of-itself. This means they're offering an ethics that, in its essence, is very different than hebraic-christian morality.

Anscombe then says this, and I think this is key "The strictness of the prohibition [of e.g. murder] has as its point that you are not to be tempted by fear or hope of consequences [italics hers]. I think this is important because, going forth, she is going to contextualize ends-based morality (whether deontological or consequential) as a kind of 'temptation' allowing one to rationalize bad moral action (showing my cards: I think this is a brilliant move, and partially right)

Continued Summary:

Do you smell a rat between Mill and Moore? Anscombe does - his name is Sidgwick. She thinks he's wrong about everything and wrong in an egregiously vulgar way.

What's the heart of Sidgwick's error? Intention.

Sidgwick thinks that any intention must involve any foreseen consequences of one's actions. Anscombe thinks this is a bona fide howler. This howler rephrased : It doesn't matter that you didn't intend some outcome, if you could foresee that your action would lead to that outcome.

Anscombe uses an example to show this is no good:

Take a guy who is responsible for a little boy (gendering for ease of pronouns). It would be bad for him to withdraw his support, because he didn't want to support him anymore.In classic morality, It would also be bad for him to withdraw support because, in doing so, he would compel someone else to do something, even if that something were good.

But now take the case, where has to choose between two actions - one disgraceful, and one not. What if the latter leads him to go to prison? In that case, he wouldn't be able to offer support for the kid, either.

Anscombe says Sidgwick's doctrine makes the two cases equal. So this guy has to weigh the consequences: better to abandon my kid or to do the disgraceful thing and avoid prison? He won't weigh the intrinsic badness of an action, but focus on the consequences. If he chooses wrong, and does the bad thing, as long as did his due diligence in sussing out the objective moral calculus, he can't be held accountable (or so says Sidgwick.)

If I understand Anscombe's further turn of the screw, she's saying that this type of moral view makes the ultimate moral culpability of a person rest on how well he performed his duties in weighing consequences & acting accordingly so that moral accountability takes on a whiff of the ledger.

I think there's a really important point she's making that doesn't immediately shine through.
It's something like Goodhart's law : "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Once you make the backbone of morality the idea that you're culpable for any consequence of your actions that could be foreseen, you set up, perhaps despite yourself, a moral situation where people develop a system of calculating consequences in advance. What may have started as possibly reasonable (taking into account consequences) metastasizes into something like insurance companies predicting risk. It turns morality into something totally different, something approaching plausible deniability (to your conscience, but the same principle: youre your own pr guy to yourself)

(I really want to keep all the many moving pieces in mind, because I have a hunch that (1) Anscombe has a deceptively good argument but also (2) if we steelman Anscombe's argument,and take it seriously, it undercuts much of her own thrust (not just to dunk on Anscombe, but to show her argument takes us beyond what she is trying to do.)

Once you make the backbone of morality the idea that you're culpable for any consequence of your actions that could be foreseen, you set up, perhaps despite yourself, a moral situation where people develop a system of calculating consequences in advance. What may have started as possibly reasonable (taking into account consequences) metastasizes into something like insurance companies predicting risk. It turns morality into something totally different, something approaching plausible deniability (to your conscience, but the same principle: youre your own pr guy to yourself) — csalisbury

I don't see how this is a problem. Human actions, by their very nature are means, they are never ends in themselves. All we have, as evidence, to judge a person's morality, is the person's actions. They keep their intentions to themselves, and if they claim to reveal them, the revelations may not be truthful. If a person is responsible for the moral character of one's own actions, regardless of one's intentions (the end cannot be used to justify the means because the end cannot be proven), then it is of the utmost moral importance for the person to calculate the possible consequences of one's action prior to acting.

This does not turn morality into "something totally different", it simply provides a realistic representation of what morality is, instead of hiding it behind some idealistic veil. We, as adult human beings, are responsible for our actions regardless of what might be our intentions. If our actions bring about unintended results, we cannot justify those actions by simply claiming it's not what I intended, and I forgot to consider all the possible consequences ("sorry mom, it was an accident").

Banno suggests we simply deem "courage" as a virtue, and get on with it, without defining what courage is. But if we allow rashness to enter into the nature of courage, such that people are encouraged to act in a reckless manner with complete disregard for possible collateral damage, then how can we say that this type of "courage" is a virtue?

He won't weigh the intrinsic badness of an action, but focus on the consequences. — csalisbury

By the way csalisbury, I think you must have misrepresented this idea, because the way you have presented it is oxymoronic. There cannot be "intrinsic badness" of any particular action because the goodness or badness of an action is a judgement based on a description of the action. A description of an action is itself a consequence of the action. So the suggestion that we might separate the "intrinsic badness" of an action, from the consequences of that action, is in fact an oxymoron.

One might describe the act as good, or one might describe the act as bad, either way the description of the act is consequent to the act. We cannot describe the act before it occurs, for the very reasons given. Prior to its occurrence it is apprehended in terms of possibilities and we cannot foresee them all. We must respect the uniqueness of every particular act, such that a prescribed general type of act cannot serve as a description of the particular act, in order to judge an act prior to its occurrence. A general type is not the description of any particular. Therefore, "this act will be x type of act" cannot serve as a description of the act. And judgement of the act requires a description of it. It is only 'type' which allows "intrinsic badness", when badness is a property believed to be essential to that type. But the particular act cannot be judged as a specific type of act without a description of the act, which can only be provided after the occurrence of the act.

then it is of the utmost moral importance for the person to calculate the possible consequences of one's action prior to acting. — Metaphysician Undercover

We can only see the future through a glass darkly. Even if we never had to act while tired or in pain and always had hours to flowchart outcomes, there would be unknowns.

Morality is ultimately about judgement. It's about living with the consequences of our past actions. We head into the future with the innocent but potentially destructive desire to live. We cant take responsibility for that desire, only how we channelled it.

I'm doing mostly exegesis right now.

So... she would have us replace an algorithm with a heuristic.

I'd go along with that. Algorithms were long held as the quintessence of rationality; but their limitations are by now obvious to even the logicians.

The best we can do is just muddle along. Hey, @unenlightened?

I just read the very intro, and sorry if this has been covered;

but, has a philosophy of psychology been established or is that like some ongoing goal?