'll let that rest here, in suport of my previous comment. — Banno
Yeah, I do like how openly frustrated she is with her contemporaries. Her prose is clunky. I don't get the sense that she's constitutionally incapable of good prose (i dunno haven't read her before); it just seems like she has some holistic sense of what she wants to say, but is having trouble laying out all the nuances serially. Slightly constipated. & so you get sections like the brute fact one. I've now forged (sometimes impatiently) through the essay and think I have a vague understanding of what she's trying to say, but I'm going to go back to the step-by-step approach to see if I can make it clearer to myself. I left off at the brute fact section.that’s what I’m doing. I’m enjoying her humour, although it is stuck-up, stifling English. — Banno
My experience with Nietzsche says we should spend a little time trying to understand her point rather than unwinding the package it's coming in, — frank
I read her as rejecting law-bound morality in favour of developing virtue. SO the attack - pp. 2-3 - her antecedents is an attack on the very notion of doing ethics by examining what is good; the section you cite is arguing that "should," "needs," "ought," "must" have been taken out of their usual place in our discourse and forced into an unnatural alliance with words such as "obligation"... And again this harks back to Wittgenstein's warnings about philosophers using words in peculiar ways.
What counts as a brute fact seems ot Anscombe to depend on what one is doing - think of Wittgenstein's discussion of what counts as simple. That's very different form, say, Searle, who talks in terms of a hierarchy, brute facts giving way to institutional facts. So the brute fact of a bunch of people running around on a field are insufficient to explain your football game; Searle would invoke brute facts, then individual and then group intent in his explanation. But it seems Anscombe would simply accept that there are different sorts of explanations for what is gong on. — Banno
but she is a catholic so I don't think she rejects all law-bound morality because that would include biblical morality. — BitconnectCarlos
So a standard analysis would be something like:
The butcher delivered the meat
If the butcher delivered the meat then you ought pay for the meat
You ought pay for the meat
...with the second premise justified by some universal law about paying one's debts or seeking the greater happiness of the butcher or whatever.
Anscombe would have us avoid this by our comprehending what is implicit in the transaction involving the delivery from the butcher, perhaps together with an appreciation of the virtue of integrity.
And actually I think that at the least a sufficiently interesting approach to be worthy of discussion. It bypasses a part of ethics that seems - well - almost autistic; lacking in a theory of mind. — Banno
I don't much care about Paul's soul, though. — Banno
That's the modus tollens reading. While you may be right - she is obtuse enough to have argued in favour of law-bound morality by on the face of it arguing against it - I think we need to get the modus ponens reading right before we give this more consideration.
i'm familiar with her theological work — BitconnectCarlos
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anscombe/#VirEth(1) If religiously based ethics is false, then virtue ethics is the way moral philosophy ought to be developed.
(2b) It is not the case that virtue ethics is the way to develop moral philosophy
(3b) Therefore, it is not the case that religiously based ethics is false.
I just got up to take a pain killer for 1. arthritic pain and 2. you. — god must be atheist
I'm struck by the similarity to an argument I have used elsewhere. You take your car to a mechanic to have a clunking noise in the engine looked at, and being of a sceptical disposition the mechanic proceeds to explain that there need be no link between the phenomenology of the clunk you seem to hear and the mooted existence of a problem in your engine. You go to another mechanic who has a better understanding of what it is you want. — Banno
Though maybe the first mechanic was almost touching on something — csalisbury
i suspect that religious, law-bound morality and virtue ethics are actually compatible to an extent; — BitconnectCarlos
"Eventually it might be possible to advance to considering the concept "virtue"; with which, I suppose, we should be beginning some sort of a study of ethics."
"It can be seen that 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." And it is the last concept that appears the most doubtful". — MMP
Perhaps; but even that would need a philosophical account of why virtue functions extraphilosophically (a meditation on philosophy and its limits, from within philosophy). Which I don't doubt can be done, but I don't think that at least that project is being pursued in this paper — StreetlightX
(5) Conceding that Hume was right in a way, but he mistook the force of his own argument: it doesn't vitiate ethics (pace Hume), nor does require that we need to bridge a gap from is to ought because that's not how 'is' and 'oughts' work! — StreetlightX
I think it might even be fair to say that in some of her other work, Anscombe saw herself as supplying at least part of what she claims is needed in order to properly account for ethics. Especially this bit:
"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, not of ethics, but of conceptual analysis - and how it relates to the actions in which it is instanced ... For this we certainly need an account at least of what a human action is at all, and how its description as "doing such-and such" is affected by its motive and by the intention or intentions in it; and for this an account of such concepts is required" - her book Intention can be read as an attempt to provide exactly such an account, or at least part of — StreetlightX
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