Elizabeth Anscombe

Quick Facts

• Name: Elizabeth Anscombe
• Full name: Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe
• Lived: 1919-2001
• Born: Limerick, Ireland
• Main setting: Oxford and Cambridge, United Kingdom
• Main fields: philosophy of action, ethics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language
• Known for: Intention, "Modern Moral Philosophy," and her translation of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations

The Big Question

What are we really judging when we judge an action: a bodily movement, an inner mental event, the agent's reason, or the outcome?

Anscombe's answer is that we must first describe the action correctly. A person does not just move muscles and then produce results. A person acts for reasons, under descriptions. If we get that wrong, our ethics will also go wrong.

In One Minute

Elizabeth Anscombe was one of the most important analytic philosophers of the twentieth century. Her short book Intention changed action theory by asking what makes something an intentional action rather than just a movement of a body.

Her key move was simple and powerful: the same physical event can be described in many ways. A man moving his arm might be pumping water, poisoning a household, earning wages, or helping a village. To know what he intentionally does, ask the special "Why?" question. If he can answer with a reason, that description belongs to his intentional action.

Anscombe also shook moral philosophy with "Modern Moral Philosophy." She argued that modern philosophers kept using words like "morally ought" and "moral obligation" as if morality were a law, while no longer explaining who or what gives that law authority. She pushed ethics back toward action, virtue, character, and human flourishing, helping revive Aristotle inside Analytic Philosophy.

What They Taught

Anscombe taught that action is not just behavior plus a private mental item called an intention. Intention shows up in what the agent is doing, how the action is described, and what reason the agent can give for doing it.

Suppose I am moving a lever. One description is "moving my hand." Another is "turning on the light." Another is "warning a friend outside." If I moved the lever because I wanted to warn my friend, then "warning my friend" gives the point of the action. If the same movement also scares a cat, that may be something I caused, but not something I intentionally did.

This is what Anscombe means by action under a description. Intentional action is description-sensitive. A person can intentionally do one thing while unintentionally doing another thing through the same movement. That matters in ethics because moral judgment depends on what the agent is doing, not only on what happens afterward.

She also developed the idea of practical knowledge. This is the knowledge an agent has of what she is doing because she is doing it, not because she observes herself from the outside. If I am writing a sentence, I normally know I am writing it without watching my hand as if it belonged to someone else. I can still be wrong about success: maybe the pen has no ink. But my knowledge guides the action. It is not just a report after the fact.

Anscombe's ethics grows out of this account of action. She thought many modern moral theories were too quick to judge by outcomes, rules, or thin words like "right" and "wrong" without first understanding intentional action. Her target was especially consequentialism, the view that what finally matters is the result an action produces. She coined "consequentialism" as a critical label.

For Anscombe, some actions cannot be justified by adding up good effects. Intentionally killing an innocent person is not made acceptable because it produces a better total outcome. Her protest against Oxford giving Harry Truman an honorary degree came from this conviction. She saw the bombing of civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki as murder, not as a morally clean act redeemed by a later benefit.

In "Modern Moral Philosophy," Anscombe made a second attack. She argued that modern philosophers inherited law-shaped moral language from Christianity: obligation, duty, permission, guilt. But many of them no longer accepted divine law or any clear substitute for it. So they kept the tone of command while losing the source of command. Her advice was not "stop caring about ethics." It was: stop pretending that the word "morally" solves the problem. Say more exact things, such as unjust, dishonest, cowardly, cruel, or unchaste.

That is why Anscombe helped restart virtue ethics. Virtue ethics asks what traits make a person good and what kinds of action fit a good human life. Anscombe did not give a full modern Aristotelian system. She cleared the ground by saying ethics needs a better philosophy of psychology: a better account of intention, desire, pleasure, reason, action, and character.

Her relation to Ludwig Wittgenstein is also central. She studied with him, became one of his literary executors, and translated Philosophical Investigations. From him she learned to look at how words work in real use. But she did not merely repeat him. She used that method to build new work on intention, action, moral description, and practical reasoning.

Key Ideas With Examples

• Intention: what an agent is doing on purpose, shown by the reason that makes the action intelligible. If I open the window to cool the room, cooling the room is part of my intention. If a paper blows off the desk, that may be a side effect.

• Action under a description: one event can count as several things, but not all of them are intentional. A person sawing wood is also making noise. He may be intentionally sawing, but not intentionally making noise, if noise is no part of his reason.

• Practical knowledge: the agent's knowledge of what she is doing from inside the action. A cook adding salt knows she is seasoning the soup because that is what she is doing. She does not need to infer it from watching her own hand, though she may discover later that the jar contained sugar.

• Consequentialism: the view that an action is justified or condemned by its consequences. Anscombe thought this can excuse too much. Framing an innocent person to stop a riot may produce peace, but the action is still the deliberate punishment of someone known to be innocent.

• Virtue ethics revival: the return to character, practical reason, and human flourishing as central ethical topics. Instead of asking only "Which rule applies?" or "Which outcome is best?", virtue ethics also asks "What kind of person acts this way?" and "Is this just, honest, courageous, or cruel?"

• Double effect: the distinction between harm intended as part of the act and harm foreseen as a side effect. Giving strong pain relief to a dying patient may risk shortening life; that is different from giving a drug in order to kill the patient, even if both acts have a bad foreseeable effect.

• Wittgensteinian grammar: the patterns that show how a word works. Anscombe applies this to action words. "Intend," "try," "do," "want," and "why" do not all behave like names for hidden objects in the mind.

Major Works

• Intention (1957): Anscombe's classic book on intentional action. It explains action under a description, the special "Why?" question, practical knowledge, and the difference between a reason for acting and a mere cause.

• "Modern Moral Philosophy" (1958): the essay that made her famous in ethics. It attacks modern law-like moral vocabulary, coins "consequentialism" as a critical term, and argues that ethics needs a better account of action and character before it can make progress.

• An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus (1959): a study of Wittgenstein's early philosophy. It helped English-speaking readers see the Tractatus as more than a positivist text about science and verification.

• Translation of Philosophical Investigations: her English translation helped shape how generations of readers encountered Wittgenstein's later philosophy.

Why It Matters

Anscombe matters because she made intention unavoidable. After her, philosophers could not easily treat action as a body movement caused by an inner mental state. They had to ask what the agent was doing, under which description, and for what reason.

She also made moral philosophy less abstract in the wrong way. Her point was not that consequences never matter. It was that consequences cannot erase the need to describe the act honestly. "I killed him to save five others" still includes "I killed him." For Anscombe, that description is morally serious.

Her influence on virtue ethics is just as important. Later philosophers such as Philippa Foot built more positive accounts of virtue, natural goodness, and practical reason. Anscombe supplied the shock that made this work urgent: modern ethics had become fluent in moral labels while losing touch with action, character, and the good life.

Proponents, Critics, and Opponents

Anscombe's closest philosophical inheritance came from Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose attention to ordinary language and conceptual confusion shaped her method. She also drew on Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, especially on practical reason, virtue, intention, and natural-law moral thought.

Her allies and successors include Philippa Foot, who developed analytic virtue ethics, and later philosophers of action who kept working on intention, reasons, and practical knowledge. Judith Jarvis Thomson is a more mixed case: trolley-problem debates often disagree with Anscombe, but they still move in territory she helped mark out, especially the difference between intending harm and merely foreseeing it.

Her main opponent was Utilitarianism and the broader family she called consequentialism. She also pushed back against the post-G. E. Moore habit of discussing "good," "right," and "ought" without a thick account of action, virtue, or human life. J. L. Austin shared her interest in ordinary language, but Anscombe used that attention less for speech acts and more for action and responsibility.

Critics say her moral prohibitions can be too rigid, that her Catholic commitments sometimes do more work than she admits, or that consequentialists can handle intention better than she allowed. Even critics usually have to answer her central demand: before judging an action, say clearly what the person is doing.

Related Pages

• Analytic Philosophy
• Ludwig Wittgenstein
• Philosophical Investigations
• Aristotle
• Thomas Aquinas
• Philippa Foot
• Judith Jarvis Thomson
• Utilitarianism
• G. E. Moore
• J. L. Austin