Anscombe, Foot and Wittgenstein: Aristotelian Necessities and Forms of Life
(2025) The Bloomsbury Handbook of Wittgensteinian Feminism — ISBN: [9781350506732], 51-67, published
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- Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001) and Philippa Foot (1920-2010) met at the end of the 1930s. They were amongst the first women students at Oxford University. Together with a couple of other female students (Cf. Teichman 2019: 2-3, Mac Cumhaill & Wiseman 2022, Lipscomb 2021), they disapproved of the way philosophy, and more particularly moral philosophy, was taught at British universities at the time, namely as a sort of pure confrontation of logical and formal arguments with no considerations for real life concerns such as fascism, the war and bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ‘It was clear that we were all more interested in understanding this deeply puzzling world than in putting each other down’, Mary Midgley (2013) reports. According to Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman (2022), their female condition led these women to be more in touch with the practical realities and necessities of everyday life and concerns (Aucouturier 2022). This special position as women in a men’s world led them to see problems that their colleagues would not consider and to approach philosophical issues from a less abstract point of view. That is why Anscombe and Foot reinvented moral philosophy by resisting the common stances of their time (notably advocated by Alfred J. Ayer) that moral philosophy could be a mere abstract matter of conceptual analysis and that no objectivity in morality was possible. Together with Iris Murdoch, they wanted to be able to claim that: “Trend is a good man and Rowse is a bad man.” [...] Elizabeth, in her report to the Mary Somerville Fellowship Committee, proposed to “work out [her] doubts about what is called analytical philosophy”. Philippa wanted to show that “it can’t just be a matter of booing and hooraying: when we say there was something absolutely wicked about the Holocaust, this is not just a personal decision, decision not to do such things, or an expression of disapproval. There is something objective here.” (Mac Cumhaill & Wiseman 2022: 182-183) This is one of the reasons why they ended up promoting a kind of naturalism inherited from Ludwig Wittgenstein, and more precisely from his neo-Aristotelian readings. This naturalism takes seriously his remark that ‘[c]ommanding, questioning, storytelling, chatting, are as much part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing’ (PI 1953: 25). It proposes to understand human action, and more specifically the normative aspects of human action, in the context of such a ‘natural history’. It notably suggests understanding the value judgements regarding human action in continuity with what humans do and need in general, in accordance with their ‘form(s) of life’ (PI 1953: 23), i.e. not only as ‘social’, but also as ‘natural’ beings. In other words, when it comes to understanding what people do and why they do it in reference to their (human) form of life, there is not gap of any sort between what we would commonly call their ‘natural’ needs and behaviours (‘walking, eating, drinking, playing’) and other ‘conventional’ habits and practices (notably those requiring the possession of language) such as ‘commanding, questioning, storytelling and chatting’. That kind of naturalism opens the way for a feminist approach of philosophy by grounding its perspective on the point of view of the variety of human forms of life while not renouncing to a common humanity and dignity as the source of morality. To address this quest for objectivity in morals, Philippa Foot (2001: 15) appeals to what Anscombe calls ‘Aristotelian necessities’, namely ‘that without which good cannot be or come to be’ (Anscombe 1969: 15). Which entails that a proper understanding of this naturalism requires a proper understanding of the workings of the concept of ‘good’ and more specifically of the concept of ‘natural goodness’, that is of what is good for a certain being in accordance with its form(s) of life. In the human case, this last concept of a ‘form of life’ needs to be understood as reflecting what Wittgenstein calls ‘our natural history’. ‘Aristotelian necessities’ and ‘form(s) of life’ are closely linked concepts, since an Aristotelian necessity is meant to grasp what is good or what it is good to do for a certain kind of individual with a certain form of life, in a certain environment. In what follows I explore the extent to which ‘Aristotelian necessities’ may be seen as a useful concept for a renewed form of ‘re-enchanted naturalism’, to echo John McDowell’s (1995) concept of a ‘disenchanted’ or blind naturalism (i.e. blind to the teleological determinations of what happens notably in relation to human practices). A re-enchanted naturalism would consider not only the blind determinations of changes that happen in the world, but also the domain of human practices, of what humans do, of human actions (Aucouturier 2021), that is of our ‘natural history’ in Wittgenstein’s sense. To explore the extent to which Aristotelian necessities can help conceive of a re-enchanted form of naturalism, I shall first briefly consider why it is presented as an alternative to an empiricist or post-empiricist account of the origins of morals. I then turn to the concept of ‘good’ as it appears in the characterization of Aristotelian necessities, notably in relation to what Foot calls ‘natural goodness’. In the third part, I examine how some facts can create duties and how humans can come to learn non-natural necessities, such as rules, rights and promises. In the fourth and final part, I consider the extent to which such a concept of ‘natural goodness’ can account for ‘what is good for a human being’ and as such be a good candidate not only to understand our ‘natural history’ but also to provide, as it aims to do, some kind of objectivity for ethical and normative judgements and duties.
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Aucouturier, V. (2025). Anscombe, Foot and Wittgenstein: Aristotelian Necessities and Forms of Life. In S. Laugier, I.G. Gamero Cabrera, J. Trächtler, C. Braune (ed.), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Wittgensteinian Feminism (pp. 51-67). Bloomsbury Publishing plc. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/260061