Smith on Blackburn on Anscombe

Check out this post, by Professor Tom Smith, on Simon Blackburn's recent critical essay on the (Catholic) philosopher, G.E.M. Anscombe.  (Here is more, at Brian Leiter's site).  Here's a quote from the Blackburn essay:

Elizabeth Anscombe was widely recognized as the most brilliant of Wittgenstein’s students, as well as the pre-eminent translator and interpreter of his works. She was also an original and formidable philosopher in her own right, apparently able to reconcile a staunch Roman Catholicism with what she had learned from Frege, Aristotle, or Wittgenstein himself. She had a subtle and probing mind, often coming at questions in a seemingly oblique way, and whether it is the nature of the soul or the nature of the distinction between acts and omissions, she has interesting and challenging things to say. 

She was also a person of legendary force of character, frightening or charming, apparently according to the luck of the draw. Her world was Manichean, and like others in her Church she was quick to diagnose any hint of dissent as a symptom of darkness and corruption, and therefore to be treated as enmity or heresy. . . .

Anscombe’s other major theme was a morality of absolute prohibitions. This has its strengths, and we only have to think of the grubby pragmatism of a Rumsfeld or a Blair in order to become aware of them, although in these papers Anscombe showed little interest in applying her doctrine to political rights. Rather, she was interested in the ethics of various medical interventions, particularly at the beginning and end of life. Her case, naturally, hinges on the strict requirement of respect for life, and particularly human life. The things she regards as absolutely wrong express and generate “alienation from belief in the dignity and value of human-ness”. She does not explain why this respect is incompatible with, say, voluntary euthanasia, although she is insistent that it is.

This is the more surprising since she believes that right respect is compatible with swift capital punishment, since this does not “just as such” sin against the human dignity of one who suffers it. Apparently fierce justice can trump, or perhaps nullify, or at any rate live alongside, respect for the dignity of life, but compassion cannot. I could not discover why. There are other arguments against voluntary euthanasia, and Anscombe herself hints at worries about the “slippery slope” which it could open up. But I think it is impossible to base the prohibition on respect for life (let alone respect for dignity), since what it really requires is not respect for life but respect for dying—that is, for treating nature’s frequently cruel, painful, undignified and intolerable procedure for our dissolution as itself sacrosanct.

I have not read Anscombe carefully in a long time, but am reminded by Blackburn that I should do so again, soon.