Some Remarks of Anscombe’s on Faith and Justice: A Note

Abstract

In G. E. M. Anscombe’s extensive correspondence with G. H. von Wright, one of the many topics that come up is the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. What she says in these letters is significant because of the interest in what she wrote elsewhere about the use of atomic weapons. It is especially interesting because she might seem to imply here that only a person with religious faith is capable of being just. This paper quotes the relevant passages from the correspondence, explores what she might have meant, and concludes that she is not committed to the view that only the faithful can be just.

1. Introduction

Elizabeth Anscombe is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, partly because of her revival of interest in what has become known as virtue theory. In “Modern Moral Philosophy” she argues that Aristotle offers a better approach to moral philosophy than modern alternatives such as consequentialism and deontology. Part of Aristotle’s appeal is that, unlike Thomas Aquinas, whose work Anscombe admired, his moral philosophy does not involve belief in the Christian God. Christians and non-Christians alike, therefore, can be Aristotelians. However, as I shall discuss in what follows, there is some reason to doubt that Anscombe really believed that one could be a genuinely ethical person without belief in God.

Anscombe is noted not only for her purely scholarly work but also for her controversial political stances.1 Of special relevance here is her opposition to Oxford University’s awarding an honorary degree to President Harry S. Truman in 1956. Truman was generally considered a hero in the United States and the United Kingdom for having ended Japanese resistance in 1945 by ordering the dropping of atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Anscombe, however, saw the deliberate targeting of cities as mass murder. Almost alone, she spoke out against the award for Truman.

The people who support Truman’s action, both at the time and since then, generally believe that, while the bombing that he ordered cost many lives, it was the right thing to do because even more lives would have been lost if Japan had not been forced to surrender. Had Japan not surrendered unconditionally, as the Allies demanded, the country would have been invaded, which, it is believed, would have meant a long and very bloody fight. At the end of this, Japan would still have surrendered (it is plausibly speculated), but only after significantly more deaths than were caused by the use of atomic weapons. In other words, the consequences of bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as bad as they were, were better than the probable consequences of other courses of action. And it is only the consequences of actions that matter.

Anscombe coined the term ‘consequentialism’ for this view (see [3], p. 36), which she strongly rejected. Almost all moral philosophers at the time, she thought, were consequentialists in one form or another. Immanuel Kant might be thought to offer an alternative, but she rejected his idea of “’legislating for oneself’ … as absurd” [3] (p. 27). Indeed, she rejects the moral theories of all major moral philosophers from Bishop Joseph Butler to John Stuart Mill for various reasons (see [3], pp. 27–29). Major moral philosophers after Mill are all, in her opinion, consequentialists and not to be followed for this reason.

Anscombe does not explicitly recommend the work of Aquinas in [3] but pays much more attention to that of Aristotle as an alternative to the modern moral philosophy that she rejects (see [3]). Although she expresses some reservations about Aristotle’s thinking too (see [3], p. 41), her work has done more to revive interest in Aristotle on ethics than it has interest in the Christian Aquinas. So it would be interesting if her real view was that only a Christian could be just. I will say more about this below.

After the death of Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1951, Anscombe began a long correspondence with Georg Henrik von Wright who, like her, was one of Wittgenstein’s literary executors. (The other was Rush Rhees.) Also like Anscombe, von Wright was an important philosopher with interests in the philosophy of action and ethics. In two of her letters to von Wright, Anscombe discusses her opposition to the use of atomic weapons at the end of World War II. (See [4] for more information on this correspondence.) In one of these she refers to her essay on President Truman’s degree and emphasizes her belief that the just live by faith. This raises the question whether she believed that only those who live by faith are ever just, that is, whether religious faith is necessary for just behavior in her view. The faith she has in mind, far from being blind, is one that calls for intellectual ingenuity. It works against what she calls hypnotism, freeing the mind from conventional wisdom to seek the real thing for itself. I will argue, however, that she does not really believe that it is strictly necessary to have religious faith in order to be just.

2. Is Faith Necessary for Justice?

In an undated letter (presumably from 1956, when she published the pamphlet “Mr Truman’s Degree” [5]2) to von Wright, Anscombe writes:

I enclose a pamphlet which my anger at the Truman business led me to publish here. But the truth of the saying of the Apostle—Ex fide vivit justus [the just lives by faith], is strongly impressed on me. The minimum character of faith is to believe that God rewards and punishes; if people do not believe that, they will certainly commit injustices (e.g., Nuremberg nonsense) because they believe that the future is in their hands and that anything is permitted to secure some state of affairs they have convinced themselves is desirable. The results are not encouraging.3

In a subsequent letter she writes:

I am quite clear that you are right in not seeing much difference between the pattern bombing in Germany and the atomic bombing. The former is just as much large-scale murder, and therefore will meet a dreadful judgement. But—how can you say ‘it was the only way.’ Haven’t you been hypnotised by the fact that it was done and is always so justified? To mention one possibility: why not 1000 bomber raids (or 500) on large concentrations of the German army, wherever they were? These huge numbers of bombers were of course constructed because of the planned area bombing, so it would not have occurred to anyone to use them otherwise. But I think that it is wrong—a mistake you have been taken in—to say flat out ‘this was the only way.’ How can one be sure of anything of the sort? Was any ingenuity devoted to seeking another way? Of course not. And you don’t even know if it really worked to do anything but stiffen their resistance. It did not work alone, like the A bomb.

The second sentence of the first passage quoted is especially interesting, as it might seem to imply that Anscombe was not entirely satisfied with what she had written in her essay on Truman’s degree. The word ‘But’ could suggest that it does not contain the whole truth about what she thinks. It will help if we compare the letters with her other writings, including what she says about the proposed honorary degree for Truman.

In her pamphlet Anscombe says that it was the insistence on unconditional surrender by the enemy that led the Allies “to use the most ferocious methods of warfare” [5] (p. 62). It is because of this insistence that, had Hiroshima and Nagasaki not been bombed, there probably would have been an invasion that resulted in many more deaths on both sides (see [5], p. 65). Otherwise, perhaps a peace settlement could have been reached. The Japanese had, after all, already attempted to move towards a negotiated peace (see [5], p. 62). What would have happened if different decisions had been made is disputed and unknowable, but Anscombe was certain that the bombing did not save lives (and would still have been murder, hence forbidden, even if it had done so). In a letter to The Listener she wrote: “That this act saved lives is merely one of the known lies it is permissible to tell; because it is well known […] that Truman knew the Japanese were urgently seeking to surrender on terms” [8].

Perhaps Truman could think of no alternative. Anscombe sees this as no excuse. Paraphrasing Aristotle, she implies that “you cannot be or do any good where you are stupid”4 and hence it is not the case that “every fool can be as much of a knave as suits him” [5] (p. 65). To be good, one must not be stupid. However, one does not, in Anscombe’s apparent view, need to believe in God. At least, in order to know that it is murder to choose to kill innocent people as a means to one’s ends one does not need faith. “Anyone can see” that the key ideas she spells out in her pamphlet opposing such murder “are good”, she says [5] (p. 67).

A number of things are especially interesting about the letters I have quoted. We can see here Anscombe’s realistic view of human psychology, her belief in ingenuity and imagination, her resistance to being taken in by repeated excuses and faits accomplis, faith in divine justice, a clear view of similarities and differences between pattern bombing and atomic bombing, and the possible problem of “But […] the just lives by faith.”

Is faith necessary for justice? On the one hand, Anscombe says that “if people do not believe that” “God rewards and punishes […] they will certainly commit injustices.” This strongly implies that there will be no justice without faith. On the other hand, we might hope that she believed non-religious people such as Philippa Foot and Ludwig Wittgenstein were capable of just behavior. Also, in her pamphlet she wrote that “Anyone can see that [the conceptions she defends there] are good” [5] (p. 67). This anyone, presumably, includes the non-religious.

So we face a dilemma. Anscombe says in her letter that if people lack faith “they will certainly commit injustices.” She seems to believe that consequentialism is inevitable without faith in God. After all, the reason why people without faith are certain to commit injustices, she says, is “because they believe that the future is in their hands and that anything is permitted to secure some state of affairs they have convinced themselves is desirable.” However, she must have known that there have been individuals who lacked faith in God’s punishment and yet were not consequentialists and did not commit serious injustices. Aristotle is one example. Her close friend Philippa Foot is another. It is also worth noting that in her published work she holds Aristotle up as a model of how one might take such matters as justice seriously without being either a Kantian deontologist or a consequentialist, and he was without faith.

One possible solution to the problem we face in undertsanding what Anscombe thought about the relation between faith and justice would be to ignore what she says in this letter, regarding it as the result of momentary carelessness. A better solution, I suggest, is to see that in the letter she is referring to people generally, not to each individual. The ‘they’ who will be consequentialists is not every single person, including Aristotle, Foot, and Wittgenstein. It is people in general or, we might say, society. It is not each person lacking faith who is responsible for bombing Hiroshima. It is, however, people’s lack of faith that is ultimately why such things happen. Or so Anscombe appears to believe.

She does not say that the just can only live by faith. But she seems to think that in fact very few, if any, of the just lack faith. Why might this be? In these letters she says that those who do not believe in divine justice think the future is in their hands, and that people who think this are also inclined to consequentialist defences of unjust actions. In the next section I will examine what exactly is wrong with consequentialism, in Anscombe’s view.

3. Consequentialism

The problem that Anscombe sees with consequentialism is not that the consequences of actions do not matter, but rather that it is not only the consequences of actions that matter. One other thing that matters is the agent’s intention, a subject with which Anscombe was very concerned. Given that Truman did not drop any bombs himself but wrote the order to do so, it is noteworthy that Anscombe uses the question “‘how does one know what one is doing?’—when e.g., one is writing a letter” to explain to von Wright what her work on intention is about [10] (quoted on p. 40). She had been reading Aristotle and was “puzzled […] very much” by his saying that “the good of practical reasoning is ‘truth in agreement with right appetition’” [10] (p. 40). Truth, she writes elsewhere, is “one of the names of God” [11] (p. 71)5. If Aristotle is right, as Anscombe apparently believes, then good practical reasoning is godly. Truman’s knavery (as she saw his actions) was not. And understanding this involves understanding intention. Truman knew, or at the very least ought to have known, what he was doing, and that what he was doing was murder. His role in the situation constituted choosing “to kill the innocent as a means” to his ends, which “is always murder” [5] (p. 66).

Her assertion that the just lives by faith and that reward and punishment are God’s business was not a claim that Truman should not be punished by being denied an honorary degree. She mocks that suggestion in the pamphlet see ([5], p. 65). Not honoring a criminal is not the same thing as punishing him. Rather, Truman should not be honored because he is guilty of mass murder. What she seems to have in mind in much of her work in the 1950s and afterwards is the acceptance of absolute prohibitions, such as the prohibition on murder, and the rejection of the idea that it is all right to do evil so long as enough good comes of it. Attempts by consequentialists to take divine justice into our own hands lead to such things as the execution of defenseless people who may have done terrible things but broke no laws of their own country and currently pose no threat to anyone (what Anscombe calls the “Nuremberg nonsense”) and to the honoring of mass murderers. Her objection to the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg is spelled out a little more in “Does Oxford Moral Philosophy Corrupt Youth?” where she writes (sarcastically): “A good deal was done [to corrupt people], for example, by arranging trials of war criminals on the bad side with judges from the good and victorious side making up their law as they went along; this educated people out of old-fashioned over-legalistic conceptions of justice” [12] (p. 162).

Anscombe’s primary objection to consequentialism is that it recognizes no absolute prohibitions (See [3], pp. 36–37). Even murder is not ruled out absolutely if its probable consequences are good enough. Nor is the judicial killing of people known to be innocent. For consequentialists, nothing is off the table or out of the question. This also makes them shallow, she argues, because moral philosophers always consider borderline cases, but consequentialism draws no border between the allowed and the forbidden. So consequentialists end up using the borderline drawn by conventional moral thinking. They also tend to use stale or fantastic examples, she objects, which have the effect of encouraging vicious behaviour by making moral thought unrealistic. Consequentialism, then, is bad for multiple reasons, and it is bad that all major moral philosophers (according to Anscombe, writing in 1958) are consequentialists of one kind or another.

What, then, is to be done? In “Modern Moral Philosophy” Anscombe denounces modern moral philosophy, and especially consequentialism, not necessarily as the cause but certainly as part of the problem of contemporary thinking about ethics. Her proposed alternatives are a return to the kind of philosophy done by Plato and Aristotle, or the simpler reasoning of those who simply reject the recommendation of unjust acts as disgraceful, or belief in divine laws [3] (pp. 41–42). Presumably she prefers the last option, but she does not insist that it is the only one. Those who believe that God rewards and punishes will be much more inclined than others to fear God’s punishment (and act accordingly) and to see no need to mete out ad hoc punishment. In short, they are much more likely than others to be just. What is just, however, can be discerned, at least to some extent, by people such as Aristotle, and so it is not only a lack of faith that results in the kind of behaviour that Anscombe decries.6