if you had to move forward, and stepping with your right foot meant killing twenty-five fine young men while stepping with your left foot would kill fifty drooling old ones. (Obviously the right thing to do would be to jump and polish off the lot.)(From "Does Oxford Moral Philosophy Corrupt the Youth?", quoted here.)
She is joking when she says you should kill all these people. And I think she is sort of joking when she writes, in "Why Have Children?", that Sanjay Gandhi was "fortunately killed" in a plane crash, and that she is "happy to say that quite a few" people who were traveling around India sterilizing men "got lynched." She is at least, I think, enjoying the shock value of saying such things. But she isn't completely joking about this--she is very much against the sterilization program associated with Indira and Sanjay Gandhi. So that's two sides of Anscombe: jokey (in a particular, shocking, kind of way) and genuinely, in all seriousness, fiery.
Here's a third. In the same paper she writes that we should "think of a child as an 'occasion of love'--to be embraced." So she's not all salt and fury. There's love in there too. She's no softy, though, that's for sure.
After my comment on Anscombe of a month ago, I vaguely seemed to remember that there was a second passage in Culture and Value that could potentially be even more useful in putting my finger on my basic disagreement with her sensibility. Well, I now had time to locate it:
ReplyDelete"Religion says: Do this! – Think like that! but it cannot justify this and it only need try to do so to become repugnant; since for every reason it gives, there is a cogent counter-reason.
It is more convincing to say: 'Think like this! – however strange it may seem. –' Or: 'Won't you do this? – repugnant as it is. –'" (p. 34, 24 September 1937)
Now of course this is an extremely familiar aspect of Wittgenstein's philosophy of religion. But it strikes me that in Anscombe's case, her writings on subjects other than religion too are characterised by a practically total lack of passages where she reluctantly admits something to be the case or reluctantly admits some argument to be valid. In her world, as I see it, there are only two kinds of arguments: invalid ones, and ones which she is happy to, well, just humbly submit to without further ado.
To me there is something scary about this. On a completely different, and separate, level from her religious or social views being scary to a liberal secular humanist.
She does say in "War and Murder" that, "The truth about Christianity is that it is a severe and practicable religion, not a beautifully ideal but impracticable one." And I think she would accept that in the case of some Christian mysteries one should "Think like this! – however strange it may seem."
ReplyDeleteBut generally, yes, she doesn't show much reluctance about believing what she believes. Her attitude toward religion is not Wittgenstein's, but otherwise I'm not sure that this apparent lack of reluctance makes her different from most other philosophers.
You're right that she could be scary though. Anthony Kenny writes: "Elizabeth reacted with indignation when, in 1965, I told her that I planned to get married without a papal dispensation: 'Our dearest wish for you,' she said, 'must be that you will be desperately unhappy in your marriage.'" (The Tablet, 23 March 2019, p. 7).
My choice of the word "reluctance" was perhaps not the best one. I could rephrase my remark by saying that there are no trade-offs in Anscombe's world. And conventional social and moral philosophy, at least, is full of discussions of various trade-offs, even at the introductory level: think liberty vs. equality, or privacy vs. national security, or food production vs. environmental protection. Or, indeed, "killing twenty-five fine young men" vs. "fifty drooling old ones"!
DeleteAnd in this respect at least, Anscombe seems to me to be different from most of her philosophical equals (or at least those to have written extensively on social issues). In public policy, for instance, decisions have to be made all the time that are no different from that in the example Anscombe intended as jokey. What would Anscombe have done if really confronted, in real life, by being forced to be morally responsible for killing either twenty-five fine young men or fifty drooling old ones? Reading her writings, I have little or no idea, whereas I do have a fairly clear idea of what Kant, or Bentham, or Mill, or Rawls would have done. This gives them a considerable competitive advantage, or so to say.
(The standard Anscombean response is probably that excessive interest in trade-offs will amount to consequentialism, Anscombe's criticisms of which will take over at this point, as they do in "Does Oxford Moral Philosophy Corrupt Youth?". But my objection to that is one which I recall putting before: the abandonment of consequentialism would itself be a consequence, and so all moral philosophy is consequentialist when it comes to the crunch; the only difference is in what precisely the consequences in question are.)
I think she says that whatever is not bad is good and that the numbers don't matter. So if you have to choose between saving one person and saving three, either choice is good (as long as you don't choose to save none for no good reason). If I'm right about this then she would appear to reject trade-offs. I don't know what she would say about, or do, in a case where one good option really did seem much better than another. Presumably she would prefer it, but not condemn anyone who made a different (as long as still good) choice. But I'm not sure.
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