2. Anscombe's Examples

Aristotelian necessity is a fairly broad topic, as Anscombe understands it. She gives a wide range of examples of stopping modals that express Aristotelian necessity, among them ‘You can't wear that!’ and ‘You have to move your king’.Footnote ¹¹ Unlike Aristotle's examples (needing to take a drug to relieve physical distress; needing to sail to Aegina to collect a sum of money) the special sub-class of interest to Anscombe does not point to some contingent facts independent of the stuff of the stopping-modal to trigger its applicability. Her stopping-modals seem to have three interrelated distinctive features in common:

1. 1. The justification for ‘you can't…’ or ‘you have to…’ does not involve mention of any additional fact in support of the prohibition or prescription. If you ‘can't’ do such-and-such because it is N's to do (hence, you ‘have to’ let N do it), and this expresses N's right (or obligation), then the right (or obligation) is partly constituted by the fact that it is not anyone else's place to do the thing in question. N's right (or obligation) is not an independent fact that can be adduced in support of the prescription or prohibition. Rather, the prohibition and prescription are joint aspects of N's right (obligation).Footnote ¹²

2. 2. The ‘because’-clauses that one might attach to the prescription or prohibition – in this case, ‘because N is the only one who has a right/obligation to do such-and-such’ – do not provide extra reasons to do or forbear doing the thing in question.Footnote ¹³ Instead, they help to classify or thematize the stopping-modal/forcing-modal pair. The stuff of the ‘because’-clause is, in the same sense – dependent. Anscombe writes: ‘Let me now restrict the word ‘reason’ (in the context of action) to something independent which someone puts forward as his reason for what he does. And let me adopt the word ‘logos’ (I might also use ‘theme’) for the second half of ‘you can't…because…’ where the two halves are not independent. I shall say that there are various logos-types, and that the name of the general logos-type is an abstraction from many particular cases: a label which tells you the formal character of the stopping-modal’.Footnote ¹⁴

3. 3. Learning to deploy and abide by stopping-modals of a logos-type is learning both the concepts associated with the logos-type and the practical orientations that actualize the relevant logoi. The typical way in which this happens is through social interaction standardly governed in accordance with the relevant logoi. Recall Anscombe's remark about how this moral education works: ‘With one set of circumstances this business is part of the build-up of the concept of a rule; with another, of a piece of etiquette; with another of a promise; in another, of an act of sacrilege or impiety; with another of a right’.Footnote ¹⁵ I take it that her list is a sample list of logos-types. Compare: ‘one does not learn morality by learning that certain propositions – ethical ones – are true, but by learning what to do or abstain from in particular situations and getting by practice to do certain things, and abstain from others’.Footnote ¹⁶

Our capacity to operate effectively with stopping-modals, then, is grounded in the order they help to provide in our shared social lives, and serves to help participants realize those very kinds of order in those very domains of decision.

How does Anscombe's work on stopping-modals connect to the way in which philosophers like Foot and Rosalind Hursthouse turn to thought about human nature to illuminate work on virtue, on human flourishing or happiness, and a host of other ethical concepts?

Recall that Anscombe remarked that the practical education at issue in deploying and abiding by stopping-modals counted as an actualization of basic human capacities: ‘It is part of human intelligence to be able to learn the responses to stopping modals’.Footnote ¹⁷ We are the chatty animals – the rational ones. Anscombe takes a step in the direction of more recent extensions of her thought precisely by linking her exploration of stopping-modal/forcing-modal pairs to thought about discursive human reason. And her discussions of rules and rights – generally, and in the specific context of her discussions of authority – make direct reference to common human good – to what is generally needful in human life, in a way echoed by more recent neo-Aristotelian work.

For example, when invited to locate the source of the obligation to do one's word – the sense in which I do not merely risk being reproached if I break my promise, but deserve reproach – Anscombe points out that it is generally needful in human life to get other people to do things, and that this need dramatically outstrips anyone's power to get others to do his will because they love him or fear him. ‘Thus,’ she writes, ‘such a procedure [as promising] is an instrument whose use is part and parcel of an enormous amount of human activity and hence of human good; of the supplying of both human needs and human wants so far as the satisfaction of these are compossible. It is scarcely possible to live in a society without encountering it and even being involved in it’.Footnote ¹⁸

Of moral authority, she writes: ‘[The authority to declare what is right or wrong, virtuous or vicious], however distasteful it may be, is a sort of authority that can hardly be denied to exist by the most recalcitrant moral philosopher. For it is exercised by people in bringing up children; and if there is such a thing as authority of a commanding kind at all, or if there is such a thing as a right, this authority and this right can hardly be denied, since it is quite necessary, if children are to be brought up, that their bringers-up act as if they were exercising such authority; and since what is a necessity can hardly fail to be a right, so anyone who wants to bring children up must have this right’.Footnote ¹⁹ The requirement that we bring up children, of course, is perfectly general. No society is possible without meeting the requirement, and the bringing-up of children is what makes it possible for children to come into their own as the maturing, discursively reasoning, social animals that they are born to be.

In her discussion of the authority of the state, by a similar token, she argues that the right of civil authority to back up its strictures with coercive force, although it must have some standing in custom, cannot be merely a customary right. She argues that people in general need protection against violence, and also protection in law against violation of their customary rights. Partly because we are vulnerable to personal violence, partly because different systems of customary right can clash within a single complex society, and partly because we have come increasingly to inhabit complex societies, we need the kind of civil authority that is lodged in the state. That authority is nothing other than the state's claim to our regular obedience in, for example, matters of the establishment, promulgation, and enforcement of positive law. Of course, the state can forfeit its right to our obedience if it fails to discharge the tasks for the sake of which we need civil authority, and it can overreach its authority in some areas if it enshrines or extends a customary right – say, through legislation – beyond what one might call a reasonable limit. Winch imagines a case in which a society uses queueing as a mechanism of fair access in many contexts and a government eager to penalize queue-jumping by imposing strict penalties on jumping the queue as one possible instance of overreach.Footnote ²⁰

What matters for my purposes is that in all of these cases, Anscombe adverts to Aristotelian necessity as a way of arguing for a right, a rule, an institution, a practice, and the sorts of practical dispositions might actualize these in the lives of practitioners without appeal to particular customs, or instances of positive law, or contract, or pure principles of Reason that might seem to operate independently of the business of specifically human life. By the same token, appeal to Aristotelian necessity can give some leverage in arguing that what is taken to be a customary right could, actually, count as a customary wrong.Footnote ²¹ Anscombe, then, finds in perfectly general thought about what is needful in human life a source of support for some substantive ethical claims, and a check on others. The sort of justification at issue on both sides is instrumental. Uses of stopping-modals are instruments for creating and actualizing possibilities for human good. We need virtues in order to live well. Some forms of authority are required in human life if we are to manage to do the things that we must. And so on. Aristotelianly necessary matters in Anscombe's practical philosophy are collective means to common ends – where the ‘commonality’ points to shared human nature, rather than to some amalgamated measure of private interests that happen to crop up in any particular group of human beings. Part of what Aristotelian necessity can sometimes explain is why some such interests might crop up in many members of a particular group of human beings – for example, interests in marrying or making contracts or raising children

We can quarrel with Anscombe's justification of the state – noticing, for example, that the reach of the modern state dramatically exceeds the reach of, say, a Lockean umpire state. We can doubt the extent of the authority of bringers-up of children. We can notice that Anscombe does not argue that individual people will tend in general to go along with any of it, even if the justification for the relevant forms of obedience rests in what is humanly needful. In short, we can raise any number of concerns about her substantive use of thought about what humans in general need to provide such justifications. But the basic form of argument she develops in these specific contexts has been undeniably attractive to many philosophers working in contemporary neo-Aristotelian ethics. And while I do not think that she should, or even could, accept every such development of her teaching, for better or worse, her teaching has inspired an entire school of contemporary Anglophone moral philosophy. This is part of the reason that I want now to have a look at her sense of the points where thought about Aristotelian necessity fails to illuminate crucial aspects of the ethical.

3. ‘Mystical’ Value

In a recent essay, directed primarily to Foot's account of natural goodness, Anselm Müller traces out Anscombe's concern about attempting to rely upon thought about Aristotelian necessity to capture the whole of morality.Footnote ²² Müller stresses that the kind of justification that Anscombe offers is fundamentally instrumental in character. The good or point of the virtues, rules, rights, institutions, and social practices that Anscombe finds in appeals to what is generally needful in human life sees the objects thereby justified as instruments for satisfying these general needs – as ways of promoting or actualizing human good. The justifications are, in a peculiar sense, utilitarian, although the ‘beneficiary’ of the good in questions is not in the first instance an individual, or a group of individuals, or a mass of human individuals. The good in question is, as I mentioned, in a special sense, common good, where common good need not be the good of any arbitrarily large collection of individual human beings.

On Müller's reading, Foot attempts to use Anscombe-style thought about Aristotelian necessity to reach all the way down to particular individuals facing particular practical situations. This is, he thinks, why she seems to take it that a ‘Why should I be moral?’ question will cease to arise once we have fully appreciated the character of natural goodness. Because Foot ties morality explicitly to rationality, it looks like a ‘Why be moral?’ question, when pushed, will slide toward something on the order of a ‘Why be rational?’ question, and there are well-known arguments to the effect that it is hard to see how such a question ever could be given a sensible answer.

Although Anscombe explicitly links her discussions of stopping-modals and forcing-modals to general concern over human intelligence and the practices of human reason, she does not take this extra step. More than this, she comes to reject the suggestion that all important points about the virtues and their exercise can be grounded in thought about what is humanly needful.

Müller puts her point this way:

Anscombe argued that central aspects of virtue, for example refusing to engage in murder as a means or an end, could not be understood in terms of Aristotelian necessity. Müller's gloss on her refusal to seek a grounding for the prohibition on murder in Aristotelian necessity is, I think, right. Anscombe's writing on the topic takes a less abstract tack.

Given that the one wronged by murder is, in the first instance, the victim, Anscombe writes:

She goes on to argue that the aspect of human nature at issue in the prohibition on murder is something on the order of the spiritual nature of human beings, a source of supra-utilitarian value.

In other writings, she brings together this thought with specifically theological concerns about our ultimate end. We may be unwilling to follow her that far. But she does, I think, supply is with grounds to be suspicious of the general extension of her thought about Aristotelian necessity to cover the whole field of morality.