Morality and Human Nature: A Study of the Moral Thought of Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch

with Dr Ana Barandalla (London)

In this Course we explore some of the moral views developed by Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch. Their views stood apart from the moral philosophy prevalent during their careers. But their views have been mostly left out of the canon, whilst the views they opposed have to a large extent shaped analytic moral philosophy to the present day.

A key tenet of the moral philosophy of their time was the thought that statements of value cannot be derived from statements of fact. For G. E. Moore, this was because he took the good - the fundamental value - to be not part of the facts to which factual statements refer, he thought it to be sui generis. So we cannot derive value statements from statements of fact. For A. J. Ayer, it was because he regarded statements of value to fall outside the realm of logic altogether, so, on his view, they could not be derived from anything. And for S. Hampshire it was because he thought that value pertained exclusively to the will, that the will had no bearing on thinking, and that thinking is about a value-less world.

Our women strongly objected to the this division - a division that rendered ethical communication ultimately impossible, and confined ethical activity to a discrete area of life. They argued that a proper understanding of our nature reveals that value modulates our epistemic engagement with the world. Hence, descriptions of the world are always somehow tethered to value, and so statements of value can be derived from statements of fact. Ethical communication is therefore possible, and the ethical life is ubiquitous.

In this Course, we explore how each of our four thinkers pursued this line of thought. We see how Midgley focused on the role of our evolution as species; how Murdoch employs insights from outside philosophy, namely, from Freud’s work, and from Christianity; how Foot makes the notion of flourishing her centrepiece; and how Anscombe urges a greater philosophical understanding of psychology than was currently available.

All in all, we see how these women regarded morality as a very different object of study to how their contemporaries saw it. And in so doing, we get a glimpse of how the study of morality might have developed, had these women’ voices received greater attention.

Ana Barandalla is Associate Researcher with the ‘In Parenthesis’ project, which aims at exploring and spreading the underappreciated work of Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch. Check out their awesome work at: http://www.womeninparenthesis.co.uk/