by Joseph Shieber
In one of those strange cases of synchronicity that occasionally arise in publishing, two books – issued within a year of each other – appeared on the same under-researched topic, a discussion of the lives and intellectual impact of the philosophers G. E. M. Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, and Mary Midgely. The first of the books to appear, The Women Are Up To Something, by Benjamin Lipscomb, traces the lives of all four philosophers, with a central focus on their training at Oxford and their formative years as budding professional philosophers, but with a discussion of the full scope of their intellectual lives. The second book, Metaphysical Animals, by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, is more tightly focused on the period in which the four philosophers found their professional footing; whereas Lipscomb’s book takes the reader up to Mary Midgely’s death in 2018, Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman end their narrative in the 1950’s.
Both books are worth reading, though Lipscomb’s is perhaps the more engagingly written of the two. Lipscomb organizes each of the main chapters around one of the philosophers, making it easier to follow the narrative, whereas Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman hew more closely to chronology to structure their account, tracking each of the philosophers’ developments in every chapter, making it sometimes more difficult to keep track of all of the names of the secondary characters. Despite covering much of the same ground, both books often treat the same anecdotes and philosophical content in slightly different ways – and have sufficient non-overlapping content – so that I am happy that I read both books.
Both books also share a similar weakness, one perhaps unavoidable in works aimed at a broad, non-specialist audience. It’s that they tend to flatten out the discussion of deep philosophical questions, leaving readers with the impression that the debates of the past have been settled. In the case of both books, the suggestion is that the story of Anscombe, Foot, Murdoch, and Midgely is the story of how this band of outsiders could push back against the ascendancy of the fact-value distinction in ethics.
The fact-value distinction involves the idea that there is an insurmountable gulf between statements of fact (“there are six chairs around the table”) and statements of value (“puce is an ugly color for a table”). As Lipscomb points out, in motivating the idea of the distinction for non-philosophers, the fact-value distinction is now commonly drilled into K-12 students in the United States as the distinction between “facts vs. opinions.” Roughly, if you can provide objective evidence for a claim, evidence not resting on personal or parochial preferences, that claim is (a candidate for being) a fact. If, however, your claim does rest – at least in part – on personal or parochial preferences, that claim is an opinion.
Mid-20th century Oxford was dominated by philosophers who took the fact-value distinction for granted. The publication of A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic in 1936 had solidified the notion of the fact-value distinction under the rubric of what came to be known as “expressivism” in ethics. According to expressivism, when you make an evaluative claim about some object or event you’re not actually attempting to make a factual claim at all; rather, you’re simply expressing your favor or disfavor about that object or event. For example, if I say, “murder of innocents is wrong” I’m not making a claim that could actually be true or false. Instead, I’m expressing my distaste about the murder of innocents, something akin to shouting (imagine the appropriate look of disgust on my face), “Murder of innocents, yucky!”
Philosophers call ethical theories, like expressivism, that involve the notion that claims about value are not intended to be claims that could be true or false, “non-cognitivist” theories. In contrast, ethical theories that allow for there to be true or false claims about value are called “cognitivist” theories.
Both Lipscomb and Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman frame their books around the tension of the opposition between the non-cognitivist theory of ethical expressivism, dominant in the Oxford of the time, and the cognitivist ethical theory that Anscombe, Foot, Murdoch, and Midgely were developing as an answer to that theory. (More precisely, both books treat the prescriptivist theory developed by R.M. Hare, a more sophisticated form of non-cognitivism, as the foil to the theory developed by Anscombe, Foot, Murdoch, and Midgely. We can safely ignore that additional sophistication.)
Why did Anscombe, Foot, Murdoch, and Midgely reject the dominant non-cognitivist theory of their day? According to both sets of authors, the horrors of the Holocaust and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki convinced the quartet that non-cognitivism wasn’t sufficient to address the challenges of morally engaged life in the 20th century.
Thus, Lipscomb observes that Ayer’s expressivism “was incompatible with the political idealism of Murdoch and her peers—with the judgments they were making every day about right and wrong, just and unjust.” (Lipscomb, p. 67)
And Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman note – writing about Foot, in language that could apply equally well to Anscombe, Murdoch, or Midgely – that she “… certainly couldn’t stomach … Ayer’s subjectivism. She wanted to be able to say to the Nazis: ‘But we are right, and you are wrong.’ She wanted the idea of an objective moral reality against which actions could be judged wrong or bad and not just inconsistent or irrational.” (Mac Cumhaill & Wiseman, p. 242)
With this framework in mind, it’s possible now to state the problem with both Lipscomb’s and Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman’s treatment of these issues. First, they don’t adequately address how it is that non-cognitivism is worse than cognitivism in dealing with horrors like the Nazi Holocaust. Second, the solution that they sketch on behalf of Anscombe, Foot, Murdoch, and Midgely isn’t in fact up to the task of establishing “an objective moral reality.”
Let’s tackle the first problem here. We’ll then have to do a little more stage-setting to tackle the second.
Why don’t Lipscomb and Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman establish that non-cognitivism isn’t up to the task of criticizing the Nazi Holocaust? The simple answer is that they’re wrong when they write that non-cognitivism is incompatible “with … judgments … about right and wrong, just and unjust,” or that the non-cognitivist wouldn’t be able “to say to the Nazis: ‘But we are right, and you are wrong.’”
As long as “judgment” is understood as a statement, a verbal act like saying to the Nazis, “We are right and you are wrong,” the non-cognitivist CAN perform such acts. Indeed, when it comes to what we can SAY, nothing in Lipscomb or Mac Cumhaill’s and Wiseman’s discussion – other than the attribution of truth or falsehood to evaluative claims – would be off-limits for a non-cognitivist. (This isn’t to say that there aren’t problems for non-cognitivists. One of the most challenging, the so-called “Frege-Geach Problem,” would have been too technical for inclusion in books aimed at non-specialists.)
Furthermore, when it comes to actually fighting Nazis, the non-cognitivists were certainly no slouches. Ayer joined the Welsh Guards when war broke out, and served in the SOE and MI6, rising to the rank of captain. As mentioned by both Lipscomb and Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman, R. M. Hare was taken prisoner by the Japanese, and had to endure forced labor in the construction of the Burma Railway, which became one of the bases for the 1957 David Lean movie The Bridge On The River Kwai. J. L. Austin, another foil for the quartet in both Lipscomb’s and Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman’s books, was instrumental in assembling the intelligence that led to the successful invasion of Normandy on D-Day.
Meanwhile, as John Schwenkler describes it, Anscombe’s first publication (with her friend Norman Daniel) was
a pamphlet titled “The Justice of the Present War Examined: A criticism based on traditional Catholic principles and on natural reason.” It presented “the results achieved in a series of open discussions held at Oxford both before and after” Britain’s declaration of war against Nazi Germany in September of that year. Anscombe and Daniel concluded that the war against Germany was unjust, partly because it would involve the deliberate massacre of civilian populations.
In fighting Nazis, I’d rather have Ayer, Hare, and Austin on my side than Anscombe.
So much for the motivation of the quartet in opposing non-cognitivism. What about their proposed solution?
As both Lipscomb and Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman describe it, the solution Anscombe, Foot, Murdoch, and Midgely proposed was a fusion of Aristotelian virtue and Wittgensteinian theory of meaning.
The Aristotelian virtue component gave the quartet the idea that fact and value could indeed be intertwined. It is a fact, for example, that sunlight and water are necessary for a plant to thrive. Thriving, however, is a natural good for plants. Thus, so the idea goes, it is a fact that sunlight and water are good for plants.
As Lipscomb puts this idea, “we can make sense of the idea of a human being’s proper function, of a characteristically human pattern of life. If so, then we could, with Aristotle, begin to work out a table of the traits that enable people to live vibrantly successful (Anscombe’s word was “flourishing”) human lives, and build an account of ethics on that footing.” (Lipscomb, p. 182)
The contribution of the Wittgensteinian theory of meaning to the quartet’s opposition to non-cognitivism involved prompting them to pay more careful attention to the words that we actually use in making evaluative judgments. Rather than the abstract “good” and “bad” or “right” and “wrong,” we should consider terms that we actually use in our everyday evaluations of others and their actions.
Thus, Lipscomb writes that Anscombe perceived the value of precise attention to meaning in providing a foundation for ethical theory: “The advantage of terms like ‘‘unjust’ over the terms ‘morally right’ and ‘morally wrong’,’ she argues, is that ‘unjust’ has some guiding content. It means something.” (Lipscomb, p. 182)
It was Foot, however, who accomplished the fusion of these two disparate influences, first, and most notably, in her 1958 article “Moral Beliefs.”
Lipscomb describes the thrust of Foot’s attack on non-cognitivism in that article as follows: “We cannot strip away recognizable human concerns altogether—brush aside the skeptical question, ‘what’s the point?’—and still use the word ‘good’ in an intelligible way. Several times in her article, Foot repeats a refrain: ‘just try.’ Just try, that is, to assess people’s characters and behavior without tethering these assessments to natural human concerns—thus leaving them vulnerable to facts.” (Lipscomb, p. 204)
And Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman describe Foot’s insight in “Moral Facts” this way:
Although we might disagree about whether Lady Bathurst’s son was humiliated, or whether wearing colourful clothes (or trousers) is ostentatious, there are nevertheless limits imposed by reality, by human life, on how these words can be sensibly used. ‘It is surely clear’, she would write, ‘that moral virtues must be connected with human good and harm, and that it is quite impossible to call anything you like good or harm.’ [153] With this insight, she found a way to put value back in the world, and to reconnect moral language to human life. The connection to virtue or vice is not a disguised appeal to a higher-order principle: ‘Do not be ostentatious’ or ‘Always display humility’. Philippa did not think (as many contemporary ‘virtue ethicists’ do) that bringing an action under a virtue description implies that it ought to be done. Rather, the virtue term gives a ‘way of looking at something’, a way of seeing the facts in the light of ideas about the human good … (Mac Cumhaill & Wiseman, p. 307)
This, however, brings us to the second problem with Lipscomb’s and Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman’s discussion of the quartet’s rejection of non-cognitivism. Neither set of authors wrestles sufficiently with the fact that, as described, the quartet’s solution does not establish “an objective moral reality.”
The problem is this. In order for the quartet’s solution to provide objective moral facts, that solution would have to lean heavily on the idea that there is a set of natural goods for humans. If they stuck to Aristotle, this would, perhaps, be possible. Bringing in Wittgenstein, however, complicates the picture.
Famously, Wittgenstein (the “later” Wittgenstein from which the quartet drew their inspiration) held that meaning is use. In different contexts of use, the same word could have utterly different meanings.
Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman provide an example of this, from Wittgenstein’s interactions with some of his students:
Wittgenstein: Suppose that for some people counting were learnt first as a sort of poetry, and then later used as a way of measuring fields. You see someone pacing in a field. What makes you say he is measuring and not doing poetry?
Student 1: You find out if he is counting?
Wittgenstein: You don’t know his language.
Student 2: You see if his pace is a constant unit?
Wittgenstein: That might be a dance.
Wasfi Hijab: You study their lives.
Wittgenstein: Yes, you need the context of a lot of other things they do. Take any such phenomenon as comparing colours, measuring time, comparing lengths, playing games. These are specific. ‘I’ll show you things we humans do.’ (Mac Cumhaill & Wiseman, p. 171)
The problem with this, then, is that different “things we humans do” could give rise to different, incommensurable moral standards. Certain behavior – marrying your first cousin, for example – could be virtuous or vicious, depending on your community.
With this in mind, read this criticism that Lipscomb makes of the non-cognitivists on behalf of the quartet: “Not believing in any standards above themselves, all [non-cognitivist] theorists like Hare are left with are ‘common standards . . . ‘our’ standards, shown by ‘what we say’ in judging others.’” (Lipscomb, p. 177)
By drawing on Wittgenstein, however, all that the quartet is left with are a given linguistic community’s standards, shown by what they say in judging others! In other words, although the quartet can perhaps motivate the claim that evaluative judgments are attempts at stating truths, they do so at the cost of abandoning the objectivity of those truths. If the appeal is to contexts of use to establish the meaning of evaluative claims, and if those contexts of use are diverse enough to give rise to incommensurable meanings, then the quartet has lost the objectivity of evaluative claims.
To take one example – Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman claim that, “‘The meaning of “offensive” is not found solely in the dictionary but in human life: to give its meaning would be to describe not just the rules of etiquette and offence, but the social life of human animals, how hierarchy is achieved and sustained, how relationships are built and sundered.’” (Mac Cumhaill & Wiseman, p. 256) This way of understanding the meaning of “offensive” would only yield objectivity, however, if there were ONE set of social facts capable of underwriting such evaluations.
Indeed, many of the sorts of evaluative terms that Foot appeals to – “offensive,” “humiliating,” “ostentatious” – underscore this worry. These are evaluations that are inextricably linked to thick social contexts. What counts as ostentatious among the landed gentry of Foot’s childhood (Foot’s paternal grandfather was a barrister and judge, and her maternal grandfather was President Grover Cleveland) would be different than what would count as ostentatious for an arriviste who has clawed their way up from Croydon to Knightsbridge.
Indeed, Foot herself recognized this worry. To his credit, Lipscomb at least notes this, writing that, “After 1960, Foot became dissatisfied with this response. Mightn’t there be whole contexts—like Nazi-occupied Europe—in which virtue didn’t pay? And while it might be difficult to be selectively virtuous, wouldn’t it be more rational, if one could somehow pull it off? Or suppose someone rejected the standard of virtue altogether? Was that person necessarily making a mistake? Foot called this problem ‘the tight corner.’” (Lipscomb, p. 211)
What we’re left with, then, is a pair of engagingly told stories that succeed as group biographies but aren’t quite up to the task of fully exploring the philosophical quandries with which Anscombe, Foot, Murdoch, and Midgely wrestled. To be fair, however, I am not sure it is possible both to tell a story of philosophers’ lives engaging enough for non-specialists and to treat the philosophical issues with sufficient depth. The tight corner, indeed.