Evading Responsibility

The dark alternative to morality offered by treating outcomes as all that matter

“So it will follow that you can exculpate yourself from the actual consequences of the most disgraceful actions, so long as you can make out a case for not having foreseen them.”
- Elizabeth Anscombe, 1958

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s brilliant student, Elizabeth Anscombe, was one of the four ‘Oxford Moral Philosophers’, along with my mentor Mary Midgley, Phillipa Foot (who devised ‘the trolley problem’), and the novelist Iris Murdoch. Despite their immense achievements, their insights are routinely skipped over, they are rarely cited in the academic literature, and their warnings are flatly ignored. This is unfortunate, since these remarkable women worked hard to prevent the slide into catastrophe we have lived through, and each one has their own unique contribution to resisting the ongoing devastation of morality.

Anscombe’s essay “Modern Moral Philosophy” was published in 1958, the very same year that Hannah Arendt warned us of the dangers of mass society and what I have called ‘the Forge of Ends’ (i.e. the adopting of any and all means in the pursuit of ends). Anscombe was also greatly concerned about the Forge of Ends, and attempted to intervene against an entirely new form of immoral philosophy she called consequentialism. This was growing in academic stature at the time she wrote, and her name for it has stuck, and is now borne as a badge of honour. Today, the vast majority of academic philosophers are consequentialists, which is to say, they have abandoned principled ethics for the corrupt altar of the Forge of Ends.

The root of Anscombe’s concern was Henry Sidgwick, a nineteenth century British utilitarian (i.e. the philosophy of the ‘greatest happiness for the most people’). Anscombe recognised that Sidgwick’s view of intention contained a dangerous assumption: that in judging a person’s responsibility for a foreseen consequence, it doesn’t matter whether they desired that outcome or not. This sounds sensible... but Anscombe foresaw a trap here, for in contriving this view of intent, Sidgwick opened the door to the idea that we are only responsible for foreseeable outcomes. This degenerate philosophy lies behind almost all the major abominations conducted by contemporary governments.

Anscombe’s complaint was that Sidgwick lets us imagine that it is “quite impossible to estimate the badness of an action except in the light of expected consequences.” This allows people to deny responsibility for “the actual consequences of the most disgraceful actions”, as long as they can claim not to have foreseen them. Conversely, as an Aristotelian (and a Catholic Christian), Anscombe maintains that we are responsible for the bad results our bad actions cause (and get no credit for the good outcomes), but are “not responsible for the bad consequences of good actions”. Anscombe, in other words, contends we have duties to avoid acting in certain ways regardless of the outcomes, and that any inexcusable action taken cannot be forgiven on account of its good intentions nor even its good outcomes.

In other words, Anscombe - along with Aristotle and a long history of Catholic philosophers - denies the necessity of the Forge of Ends. If Arendt’s solution was to smash the forge, Anscombe’s proposal was to cleave to a tradition of duty and virtue that renders certain actions unacceptable regardless of their consequences. Thus she saw consequentialism as an abject philosophy that elevates the Forge of Ends until it entirely obscures all moral light. As she rightly contended, the reason that consequentialists spend so much time pondering hypothetical situations (such as claiming that murder is necessary in Foot’s ‘trolley problem’) is to consent to terrible actions by imagining their necessity.

Yet Anscombe’s solution is not much easier than Arendt’s... if we cannot undo millennia of the dominance of ends and means on our thinking, it is a tenuous solution to rely upon concepts of duty or virtue to constrain the Forge of Ends - especially at a time when virtue ethics lies in ruins. Most people today cannot even imagine moral principles acting as a bulwark against the seductive power of ends and means. But worse, contemporary religious traditions have failed in their commitment to virtue and duty precisely because the Forge of Ends has dominated their thought, which for all Abrahamic religions entails a forbidden idolatry. We have witnessed the brutal horrors unleashed when the Forge of Ends is elevated to the sole standard for moral judgement, and scandalously we are not ashamed of our grotesque evasion of responsibility.