“My third thesis is that the differences between the well-known English writers on moral philosophy from Sidgwick to the present day are of little importance.”

What does it mean?

The usual reading takes the thesis as a judgement of scale. From Sidgwick to the moral philosophy of her own day, the well-known English writers differ, and she says those differences are of little importance beside what they share. A competing reading hears a sneer that no distinction inside that literature is worth making, which would make her own later pages pointless. She spends the article on a change she thinks arrived with Sidgwick: a willingness to set aside prohibitions on kinds of action and to settle rightness by consequences. Against that change, the quarrels among intuitionists, emotivists, and consequentialists look to her like a family disagreement. The sentence is her third thesis, in her own English, at the opening of the 1958 paper. It is not the moratorium, and it is not the attack on the moral ought. She thinks the shared frame is the important fact. The differences are not denied. They are ranked.

Did G. E. M. Anscombe really say this?

The library’s label is Well attested. Anscombe's own English, the third of the three theses she states in the first paragraphs of the article. The first, on laying moral philosophy aside until there is a philosophy of psychology, and the second, on jettisoning the moral ought, are already in this library. This sentence is the comparison, not a repeat of either.

Where it comes from

'Modern Moral Philosophy', Philosophy, vol. 33, no. 124 (1958), the opening statement of the three theses

Approximate date: 1958.

How to use it

A reading group in Oxford that spends the term on which recent English moralist is the bold one, and never asks what all of them still take for granted about consequences and the moral ought, is doing the thing she says is of little importance. The sentence does not say the books are the same. It says a contrast with Aristotle, and with an ethic of prohibited kinds of act, is larger than the contrast between the moderns. A group can still prefer one writer. It should know the size of the preference she is willing to grant.

A mindset reading

Of little importance is a comparative, and it needs the thing it is little beside. Quoted alone, it becomes a dismissal of a century. In the paper it is the third thesis, after the demand for a philosophy of psychology and the proposal to jettison the moral ought. Those two say what she thinks does matter. This one says what she thinks the textbooks have been exaggerating.

Understand the philosophy

Modern Moral Philosophy, Philosophy volume 33, 1958, opens by stating three theses. This sentence is the third, in Anscombe's English. The first and second are already in this library. The key name is Sidgwick, whom she treats as the start of the modern English consensus she finds provincial. Intention, her 1957 book, is the philosophy of psychology the first thesis asked for, and it is not turned into a motto on this page.

Related

• “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 to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible.”

  Well attested

• “It is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking.”

  Well attested

Related fallacy. Ad hominem. An ad hominem answers a claim by attacking the person who made it, instead of the reasons. A fact about the speaker is relevant only when it actually bears on the evidence, such as a shown conflict of interest or a record of false reports on this subject.

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