What Were the Women Up To?
Benjamin Lipscomb sets himself the admirable, if large, task in The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics of illustrating the personal lives of these remarkable women, as well as exploring the contours of their contributions to twentieth-century philosophical ethics. The vivid picture of the lives of these four women and of their relationships justifies the purchase alone, in my estimation. But Lipscomb unifies these narratives by setting the work of Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch against what he characterizes as the regnant philosophical orthodoxy in mid-century Oxford.
Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch were afforded perhaps the perfect conditions, if one can say that of a World War without callousness, in which to mature and develop into a school of their own. They were admitted to Oxford, which had only begun granting women degrees in 1920, at a time when women were “still very much on probation in this university.” Anscombe went up in 1937, Murdoch and Midgley (née Scrutton) in 1938, and Foot (née Bosquanet) in 1939. With another generation of young men called up to the Second World War, enrollment in the men’s and women’s colleges drew roughly equal, and women were afforded a degree of attention and respect they might not otherwise have been granted. Midgley wrote, “The effect [of the demographic change] was to make it a great deal easier for a woman to be heard in discussion than it is in normal times. Sheer loudness of voice has a lot to do with the difficulty, but there is also a temperamental difference about confidence—about the amount of work that one thinks is needed to make one’s opinion worth hearing.”
Iris Murdoch
Our quartet also benefited immensely from engaging—both constructively and critically—with some of the finest minds of the time. Donald Mackenzie MacKinnon, a philosopher-theologian, exercised a tremendous, near-magnetic influence on Murdoch and Foot. Anscombe, after graduating Oxford, was awarded a studentship at Newnham College, Cambridge, and soon came to be one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s finest students, translating his Philosophical Investigations into English. Wittgenstein affectionately referred to Anscombe as “old man” (readers can make of this what they will). Each wrestled mightily with the dominant forms of philosophical inquiry at Oxford between the 40s and 60s: A.J. Ayer’s logical positivism, R.M. Hare’s prescriptivism, and J.L. Austin’s ordinary language approach to philosophy. This struggle produced profound and incisive philosophical reflection that would be developed and bear fruit for years to come.
G.E.M. Anscombe
One wonderful feature of Lipscomb’s book is the rich variety of sources he draws on in painting a portrait of each woman. We get a picture of their upbringing, their relationships to close friends and family, their locales and their movements, the social classes they moved in, and their distinctive temperaments. In fact, one of the richest and most interesting aspects of the book is how Lipscomb draws attention to the connection between temperament and philosophical reflection. Anscombe, naturally combative, headstrong, and sharp as a tack, is renowned for pieces like “Mr. Truman’s Degree,” “Modern Moral Philosophy,” and “Does Oxford Moral Philosophy Corrupt the Youth?” Murdoch, deeply attuned to interior complexity, is known as both a novelist and an acute moral psychologist, especially in drawing both on Plato and Simone Weil in The Sovereignty of Good. Foot, having grown up in a distinguished family listed in Burke’s Peerage, the granddaughter of Grover Cleveland, reflected often on social norms of etiquette and “thick” ethical concepts like “rudeness” while exploring the nature of moral judgments, beliefs, and the virtues. And Midgley’s acute interest and sustained research in biology and ethology equipped her to develop a sophisticated account of the human animal, continuous with other forms of animal life.
Now, on Lipscomb’s telling, our quartet rallied against the “billiard-ball” picture of the world, and a consequent picture of what he calls the “Dawkins sublime.” The billiard-ball picture of the universe arose in the early modern transition away from Aristotelian physics and teleological biology, toward a picture of “material reality… as inert, not directing itself anywhere or trying to achieve anything. It sits motionless (or continues in its present motion) until something external imparts energy to it.” In the process of trying to guarantee the objectivity of our observations about the natural world, early modern natural philosophers “embarked on a program of banishing from scientific discourse reference to qualitative aspects of human experience: colors, flavors, smells, sounds, and so forth.” But in jettisoning anything non-quantifiable from the description of nature, two problems followed: the dominant ethical tradition of the time, broadly Aristotelian in character, was discredited since final causes are not susceptible to quantitative measure; and, more importantly, value itself seems to be pushed out of the picture, as a “secondary quality.” The whole puzzle for modern moral philosophy (as Anscombe thought, as well as Alasdair MacIntyre after her) would then turn out to be how to develop an ethical system capable of accommodating the traditional stock of moral concepts and precepts without relying on their apparently erroneous metaphysical commitments. In light of the billiard-ball picture, the “Dawkins sublime” began to emerge as the mood characteristic of scientific and philosophical reflection in the modern age. For, given the billiard-ball picture, “the world is devoid of value, value is all in our head, and understanding the world is like gazing into an abyss.” In light of this, we must bravely face up to the world and make meaning or sense as best we can.
The biographical elements of Lipscomb’s book are rich, compelling, and well researched. At times, because of the detail afforded to biography, we lose track of the narrative that ties the story together: that these women formed something like a distinctive philosophical school in response to the felt inadequacies of the billiard-ball picture of the universe, and consequently the Dawkins sublime. But apart from the sometimes tenuous connection with these broader theoretical concerns, framing the story in terms of a philosophical school self-consciously responsive to the billiard-ball picture and the Dawkins sublime is not quite satisfactory.
For one, Lipscomb traces the origin of this picture to the early modern scientific revolution, but it isn’t clear that this takes the story back far enough. The scientific revolution did not take place in a vacuum, and the sort of methodological choices (and their corresponding metaphysical consequences) made by Descartes, Boyle, Locke, Galileo, and the like are not without precedent. It seems to me that we could reasonably trace the billiard-ball reductionist picture, on which “primary” and “secondary” qualities are sharply distinguished, back to late medieval attempts to reduce the ontological commitments associated with Aristotle’s ten categories. William of Ockham’s writings provide a prime example of this project. Likewise, we might also trace the jettisoning of “value” from the realm of nature in part to the transition from an analogical to a univocal conception of “being.” And while blame for the univocity of “being” is often laid squarely at the feet of John Duns Scotus, it is Scotus’s pupil, Antonius Andreas, who (unlike Scotus) explicitly endorsed the ontological univocity of “being,” in addition to the conceptual univocity of “being.” That is to say, the seeds for the scientific revolution may have already been latent in debates on ontology, theology, and Aristotelianism in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. And while Lipscomb cannot be criticized for failing to say everything relevant on this history (which would eventually carry us back, I suppose, to Aristotle and Plato themselves), it is worth noting that there may be a richer and longer history to be told here.
Mary Midgley
Lipscomb’s history is also, at points, a tad uneven. To put my cards on the table, I am something of an Anscombean. His treatment of emotivism could do more to account for its broader historical context, since it was a response in part to G.E. Moore’s ethical intuitionism. In the Preface to Principia Ethica, Moore writes that “the good” is an indefinable, non-natural property; hence, we need recourse to “intuitions,” ethical propositions about what is good as an end in itself that are not subject to proof or disproof. And so if, as Alasdair MacIntyre relates in After Virtue, the debates among intuitionists were waged by means of “Moore’s gasps of incredulity and head-shaking… Strachey’s grim silences and of Lowes Dickinson’s shrugs,” one can understand how emotivism begins to appear a plausible theory of moral language.
On a related note, it is surprising that Anscombe’s (admittedly dense and terse) Intention does not get more attention, though again the book is packed to the gills. One could be excused for thinking, after reading the chapter on Anscombe, that Intention was something of a niche monograph in the philosophy of action. And while it is certainly not for the faint of heart, it is also an essential complement to many of her publications, from the early 1940’s pamphlet “The Justice of the Present War Examined” with Norman Daniel up through 1958’s invective, “Modern Moral Philosophy” (and, indeed, beyond). For what unifies Anscombe’s writings on the Second World War, and the state of modern moral philosophy, becomes increasingly clear by the time that Intention is published: modern moral philosophy is corrupt in part because we lack an adequate philosophical psychology, and part of developing a clear philosophical psychology involves a proper understanding of practical rationality, intention, and the nature of action. It is just this that Anscombe begins to work out in Intention, drawing on Wittgenstein, Aristotle, and Aquinas.
Philipa Foot
In all, Lipscomb’s book is an admirably researched piece of scholarship, and compulsively readable. One gets a sense for the distinctive contributions the quartet made to twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophical ethics. The style and content make this an attractive introduction for newcomers interested in learning something about both their philosophical views and their lives, and it could be a helpful companion to both the interested layperson as well as to students. What is most valuable about the book, in my view, is the rich and evocative picture one gets of the lives of these four women.
Nicholas Sparks is a doctoral student in philosophy and bioethics at Saint Louis University. When not teaching or doing research, he spends time gardening with his wife and family.