Benjamin Lipscomb’s book, The Oxford Quartet: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midley and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics (Shackletonbooks, 2023, Kindle Edition) presents, in a friendly and well-documented tone, the contribution of these four philosophers who affirmed “that moral truths do exist, and that they are based on the characteristic nature of our species, on what human beings objectively need to prosper. They were inspired by ancient and forgotten sources—Plato, and above all Aristotle—but also by Charles Darwin and Jane Goodall, to show that we are not as exceptional as we think, much less so alien to the world (p. 9)”. A vision against the prevailing philosophy in Oxford towards the middle of the 20th century.
The modern approach that these philosophers found “formulated theories in terms of inert material bodies under the action of external forces. Our paradigm, since the beginning of the Modern Age, has been that of billiard balls on a table (p. 34).” On the other hand, the Aristotelian vision that these thinkers rescue, states that “there is an ideal for human life, a state in which we actualize our natural potential. The task of ethics is to describe this ideal as far as possible (Aristotle himself states that a precise mathematical representation of the ideal is unfeasible.) Once understood what it is, rational animals can move towards it (p. 41).”
Thus, for example, Philippa Foot realized, in her time as a student, that theories that considered moral judgments as a mere expression of approval or disapproval of the speaker, did not account for moral reality. There was more, and “I knew what I would want to say if I could find the words: that what the Nazis had done was evil: ‘it is not simply a personal decision [nor] a manifestation of disapproval. There is something objective here’ (p. 46).”
Elizabeth Anscombe came to a similar conviction in her polemic with the philosopher John Hare, who claimed that becoming a moral adult is learning to use the sentences of “ought” in the understanding that they can only be verified by reference to a standard or set of principles that we have accepted by our own decision and that we have made our own. The ambiguity and conceptual weakness of this criterion is obvious to Anscombe, for just as one can hold the opinion that we should never deliberately kill innocent people, so we could hold the opinion that we should kill innocent people if it serves our strategic objectives. This laxity of subjectivism leads Anscombe to raise the need to conceive criteria that transcend this subjectivism, otherwise philosophy would become a simple flattery of the spirit of the age (cfr. p. 197).
Mary Midgley, unlike her colleagues, had intellectual concerns that led her to move through literature, history, science, biology. This breadth of interests led her to seek the integration of knowledge and to respect the various dimensions of the human condition. She questioned extreme positions and easy disjunctions. “Like her friends, she criticized the existentialist vision according to which human beings decide, rather than discover, what is important. On the other side, she also criticized the behaviorist vision of animals and human beings as machines. In Beast and Man, in order to move towards an ethics founded on biology, she particularly criticized the hackneyed dichotomy between reason and passion (including under that heading both emotion and desire). A central purpose of the book—perhaps the central purpose—is to show that reason and passion from a system in which each plays its role (p. 274).” In this same sense, she proposed that human beings have a variety of general motivations manifested in different ways, but, “the repertoire itself is given to us, and it is from this repertoire that our reflections on how to live must begin (p. 273).”
For Iris Murdoch, “philosophical ethics had to theorize about the ‘big, relentless ego’ and define what techniques might enable us to rise above it. It would take her another ten years to synthesize it, and she would draw inspiration from Plato. But what she did know, even then, is that the way to escape a controlling obsession is not to boldly assert our freedom. Changing one’s life is more like turning the wheel of a ship or acquiring a habit than taking a single momentous step (p. 159).” Like Simone Weil, Murdoch maintained “that the human task is to withdraw from the center of ourselves and pay full, disinterested attention to the reality of others: to truly look at them without any claim to control or possession, the way one looks at a work of art, totally absorbed in it (p. 164).” And although Murdoch abandoned Christianity and belief in God, her writings reveal a nostalgia for God and the transcendent; a drift that is also evident in her novels.
Benjamin Lipscomb summarizes the contribution of this splendid quartet of philosophers by pointing out that “Murdoch questioned the dichotomy between fact and value. Anscombe and Foot undermined John Hare’s theory and urged the recovery of the concepts of vice and virtue, and of what Aristotle called eudaimonia: a flourishing life. Midgley connected this idea of human flourishing with an updated exposition of the animals that we really are (p. 281).”
Lipscomb’s book is a suggestive introduction to the thought of these thinkers, who provide arguments to maintain that moral truths exist.
