‘The Women are Up to Something’

In this essay, I offer an interpretation of the ethical thought of Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch. The combined effect of their work was to revive a naturalistic account of ethical objectivity that had dominated the premodern world. I proceed narratively, explaining how each of the four came to make the contribution she did towards this implicit common project: in particular how these women came to see philosophical possibilities that their male contemporaries mostly did not.

Davidson's Debt to Anscombe

ABSTRACTRobert Myers’ interpretation of Donald Davidson's practical philosophy gets Davidson right in many fundamental respects. Myers rightly argues that Davidson avoids inconsistencies among internalism, ethical objectivity, and the belief-desire theory by modifying central elements of the Humean belief-desire theory, and that Davidson's alternative legitimizes the extension of his interpretation and triangulation arguments into the practical sphere. But at a crucial fork in the interpretive road Myers loses his way. Davidson follows G.E.M. Anscombe down a different path, one that takes individual desires to be constituted in part by evaluative judgements.

El amor como actus humanus en Amor y responsabilidad (I). Love as Actus Humanus in Love and Responsibility (I)

Amor y responsabilidad apenas si contiene declaraciones metodológicas. No obstante, se desarrolla íntegramente en el seno de una experiencia donde la objetividad ética puede recuperarse gracias a la verdad. La experiencia fenoménica o nominalista no albergaba recursos teóricos más que para fundamentar el amor sensual. La elevación teórica de éste al amor afectivo va de la mano de un nuevo tratamiento de la experiencia que cabría identificar como fenomenológico. Pero ambos son amores “psicológicos”. Quedan por examinar los perfiles de la experiencia exigidos por un tercer nivel: el amor ético-práctico. Una experiencia que no atiende en exclusiva a lo que sucede en la persona con ocasión del cumplimiento del acto. Junto con la vivencia que la persona tiene de sí como sujeto del valor ético, la experiencia ha de abarcar la de ser la persona fuente de aquel valor a través de la causalidad. Este tercer amor, “ético” y eficaz, responde, en el sujeto, a la más alta autoría, correlativa a un acto de objetividad moral. Será objeto de un artículo posterior. There are very few statements about methodology in Love and responsibility. Still, it progresses completely within the framework of experiences where ethical objectivity can be attained thanks to truth. Phenomenic or nominalistic experience had no theoretical resources except to provide a foundation for sensual love. The theoretical elevation of this love to affective love goes hand in hand with a new approach to experience which might be called phenomenological. But both are “psychological” loves. Still unexplored are the experience profiles required for a third level: the practical ethical love. Those experiences are not limited to what happens to the person in the fulfilment of the act. The living experience of the person as subject of ethical value is on a par with experiencing the being of the person who is the source of that value through causality. This third type of love, “ethical” and effective, represents the highest level of causality, and corresponds to an act of moral objectivity, which will be studied in another paper.