{"agent_id":"anscombe","agent_name":"Elizabeth Anscombe","slug":"absolutism","label":"Absolutism: are some things — most centrally, the intentional killing of the innocent — absolutely forbidden, regardless of consequences?","topic":"Absolutism","question":"Are some things — most centrally, the intentional killing of the innocent — absolutely forbidden, regardless of consequences?","position":"Certain kinds of action — most centrally, the intentional killing of the innocent — are absolutely forbidden. No proportionality calculation, no good consequence, no extreme circumstance lifts the prohibition. The bombing of civilian populations as a means of waging war (Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the deliberate targeting of cities in any war), the judicial execution of those known to be innocent, the killing of patients to relieve resource pressure on a hospital, the killing of one to harvest organs for five — these are murder, regardless of the goods that supposedly follow from them. Anyone who proposes \"but maybe in such-and- such circumstances\" — \"if a city's population must be destroyed to end a war saving more lives,\" \"if one innocent must be killed to save five\" — is asking the wrong question. The prohibition is absolute \"in advance\" of any particular case (MMP §40); to treat it as defeasible is already to have a corrupt mind. The grounds are Aristotelian (practical wisdom recognizes certain rules as character-constituting) and Hebrew-Christian (the prohibition against shedding innocent blood as foundational to the ethical tradition); both grounds support the absolutism, and the absolutism stands without either if pressed.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Certain kinds of action — most centrally, the intentional killing of the innocent — are absolutely forbidden.","n":[]},{"t":"No proportionality calculation, no good consequence, no extreme circumstance lifts the prohibition.","n":[]},{"t":"The bombing of civilian populations as a means of waging war (Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the deliberate targeting of cities in any war), the judicial execution of those known to be innocent, the killing of patients to relieve resource pressure on a hospital, the killing of one to harvest organs for five — these are murder, regardless of the goods that supposedly follow from them.","n":[1,2,3]}],[{"t":"Anyone who proposes \"but maybe in such-and- such circumstances\" — \"if a city's population must be destroyed to end a war saving more lives,\" \"if one innocent must be killed to save five\" — is asking the wrong question.","n":[]},{"t":"The prohibition is absolute \"in advance\" of any particular case (MMP §40); to treat it as defeasible is already to have a corrupt mind.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The grounds are Aristotelian (practical wisdom recognizes certain rules as character-constituting) and Hebrew-Christian (the prohibition against shedding innocent blood as foundational to the ethical tradition); both grounds support the absolutism, and the absolutism stands without either if pressed.","n":[4,5]}]],"texts":"'Modern Moral Philosophy' (1958) §40 ('if someone really thinks, in advance, that it is open to question whether such an action as procuring the judicial execution of the innocent should be quite excluded from consideration—I do not want to argue with him; he shows a corrupt mind'); 'War and Murder' (1961, in Ethics Religion and Politics §6); 'Mr Truman's Degree' (1956, in Ethics Religion and Politics §7); 'The Justice of the Present War Examined' (1939, in Ethics Religion and Politics §8); 'Prolegomenon to a Pursuit of the Definition of Murder' (1979, in Human Life Action and Ethics §20); 'Christians and Nuclear Weapons Designed for the Destruction of Cities' (Faith in a Hard Ground §22). Reception: Just war theorists (Michael Walzer Just and Unjust Wars 1977); pacifists; the absolutist tradition in Catholic moral theology (John Finnis, Germain Grisez); the trolleyological literature (Foot, Thomson, Kamm).","works":["'Modern Moral Philosophy' (1958) §40 ('if someone really thinks, in advance, that it is open to question whether such an action as procuring the judicial execution of the innocent should be quite excluded from consideration—I do not want to argue with him","he shows a corrupt mind')","'War and Murder' (1961, in Ethics Religion and Politics §6)","'Mr Truman's Degree' (1956, in Ethics Religion and Politics §7)","'The Justice of the Present War Examined' (1939, in Ethics Religion and Politics §8)","'Prolegomenon to a Pursuit of the Definition of Murder' (1979, in Human Life Action and Ethics §20)","'Christians and Nuclear Weapons Designed for the Destruction of Cities' (Faith in a Hard Ground §22)"],"reception":"Just war theorists (Michael Walzer Just and Unjust Wars 1977); pacifists; the absolutist tradition in Catholic moral theology (John Finnis, Germain Grisez); the trolleyological literature (Foot, Thomson, Kamm).","status":"The most polemical and sharply contested position in her ethics. Mr Truman's Degree (1956) made it famous: she opposed Oxford's awarding an honorary degree to Truman because Truman had ordered the atomic bombings, which she classified as the intentional killing of innocents on a vast scale. War and Murder (1961) laid out the just-war framework within which the absolutism operates — distinguishing combatants from non-combatants, intended from foreseen, the deliberate destruction of a city from collateral damage in legitimate operations. The position is rejected by consequentialists, by some pacifists (who reject the just-war framework she works within), and by \"open-minded\" liberals who treat any absolute prohibition as a barrier to rational moral discussion. Defended by Catholic moral theology (Finnis, Grisez), by some neo-Aristotelians, and by some readers of the just-war tradition.","era":"1919-2001","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Human Life, Action and Ethics","page":"pp. 209–210","canonical":"[2]","quote":"This is a problem for those who hold that deliberately killing is absolutely out in the sort of case we may have to consider. If you don't hold that, it seems you don't get into a bind. For the whole thing begins by saying (a) You must not kill either as an end or as a means to some end. (b) Not all action that leads to someone's, or people's death, though this is not intended, is murderous and so forbidden.","label":"Human Life, Action and Ethics, [2]"},{"n":2,"work":"Part One: Ethics","page":"pp. 75–76","canonical":"","quote":"But I shall be asked for my definition of \"the innocent\". I will give it, but later. Here, it is not necessary; for with Hiroshima and Nagasaki we are not confronted with a borderline case. In the bombing of these cities it was certainly decided to kill the innocent as a means to an end.","label":"Part One: Ethics, pp. 75–76"},{"n":3,"work":"Choosing to kill the innocent as a means to your ends is alw","page":"pp. 77–78","canonical":"","quote":"Choosing to kill the innocent as a means to your ends is always murder. Naturally, killing the innocent as an end in itselfis murder too; but that is no more than a possible future development for us:' in our part of the globe it is a practice that has so far been confined to the Nazis. I intend my formulation to be taken strictly; each term in itis necessary.","label":"Choosing to kill the innocent as a means to your ends is alw, pp. 77–78"},{"n":4,"work":"Part One: Ethics","page":"pp. 74–75","canonical":"","quote":"This differed from even big raids on cities, such as had previously taken place in the course of the war, by being far more extensive and devastating and much less random; the whole of a city area would be systematically plotted out and dotted with bombs. ''Attila was a Sissy\", as the Chicago Tribune headed an article on this subject.","label":"Part One: Ethics, pp. 74–75"},{"n":5,"work":"Human Life, Action and Ethics","page":"pp. 208–209","canonical":"","quote":"One cannot say that *no* action may be done which foreseeably or probably leads to some death, or that all such actions are murderous. Why, the very begetting of a child would be murder at that rate — for the child will surely die.","label":"Human Life, Action and Ethics, pp. 208–209"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"practical-knowledge","label":"Practical knowledge: is the agent's knowledge of his own intentional action non-observational, and is practical knowledge 'the cause of what it understands'?"},{"slug":"modern-moral-philosophy","label":"Modern moral philosophy: should the concepts of moral obligation and the 'moral ought' be jettisoned because they survive from a divine law theory of ethics?"},{"slug":"anti-consequentialism","label":"Anti-consequentialism: is there a real moral difference between intended and merely foreseen consequences, and is consequentialism therefore false?"},{"slug":"the-first-person","label":"The First Person: is 'I' a referring expression, or is the Cartesian self picked out by the first-person pronoun a grammatical illusion?"},{"slug":"catholic-moral-theology","label":"Catholic moral theology: do the absolute prohibitions and the philosophy of religion follow from independent philosophical argument, or do they presuppose the authority of Church teaching?"}]}