Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy" and the Revival of Virtue Ethics

G.E.M. Anscombe (1919-2001), a Cambridge-trained philosopher who held chairs at Oxford and later Cambridge and was a student and literary executor of Ludwig Wittgenstein, published the short but immensely influential essay "Modern Moral Philosophy" in the journal Philosophy, volume 33, number 124 (1958). The essay advances three connected theses: first, that it is not profitable to do moral philosophy at all until an adequate philosophy of psychology, capable of properly analyzing concepts such as action, intention, and voluntariness, is available; second, that the specifically modern concepts of "moral obligation" and "moral duty" — a peculiarly law-like, inescapable "ought" — are best jettisoned, since they are survivals of an earlier "law conception of ethics" tied to belief in a divine legislator, and become unintelligible once that theological background is abandoned; and third, that the differences between the various post-Sidgwick English consequentialist moral philosophers are of little real importance, since they share a common, and to Anscombe's mind mistaken, structure.